HOME FOOD TO JUNK FOOD

Are you like most 1st year university students, too busy, too lazy or lack the ability to provide proper nutritious meals for yourself?? When teenagers are still living at home, their parents are responsible for their health and well being. In most families, parents provide their children with regular meals, healthy foods and proper nutrients to grow healthy. However, when their child moves away from home to go to college, he or she is responsible for providing and cooking food. And that is when the problems begin…

Students soon fall in typical 1st year students eating habits. Ordering pizza, drinking pop full of caffeine to give energy, TV dinners and fast food, snacking on junk food, vending machines, pop machines and school cafeterias are all easy and quick alternatives instead of preparing a healthy meal. However, students should be careful since junk food is full of empty calories, meaning that you get a lot of calories and little nutriental value. In a research done at South Dakota State University on nutrients in university food service meals, both men and women ate a daily average of 16% calories from protein, 41% from fat and 43% of carbohydrates. However, the American Society for Nutritional Sciences recommend no more than 30% of total daily calories from fat, 60% of daily calories from carbohydrates and 10% of daily calories from protein. On a positive note, the research mentionned that on average, men drank 4.4 glasses of milk per day and women drank 2.4 glasses of milk per day ( the Canadian Food Guide suggests 2-4 servings per day of milk products for adults).

A little bit closer to us, the McMaster Hospitality services website provides students with two sample meals from the University main cafeteria, Commons. A close analysis of the two sample meals showed that the 1st meal contained 1516 calories, 29% of calories coming from fat, and the 2nd meal contained 2484 calories, 29% of calories coming from fat which is in fact within the recommended limits of fat intakes. (view detailed meals in tables below)

1st Sample Meal:

2nd Sample Meal:

An average woman needs 2000 calories per day and an average man needs 2900 calories per day in order to maintain their weight.

Another problem that undergraduate students face is skipping meals. When living at home and attending high school, parents are there to wake them up and their schedule was regular – classes started at 8:30 every morning. In university, they depend upon themselves to wake up and their schedule is not regular – they might start classes at 11am and skip breakfast. A study published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association showed that when skipping breakfast, the overnight fast is extended which decreases the insulin and glucose levels that determine a stress response which interferes with cognitive functions. Consumption of breakfast improved performance in a viligance task-the person is asked to maintain attention in one location for long periods of time - while fasting resulted in poorer performance in a mathematical task. Brain function is sensitive to short-term variations in the availability of nutrient supplies. The omission of breakfast alters brain function, particulary in the speed and accuracy of information retrieval in working memory.