دانش آموزانی که سیب زمینی سرخ کرده خوردن را متوقف نمی کنند

Chapter 8

STUDENTS WON’T GIVE UP

THEIR FRENCH FRIES

by Elizabeth F. Farrell

from The Chronicle of Higher Education

On a recent summer night at the local Dairy Queen in Moorhead, Minnesota, Debra Lee-Cadwell, the director of dining services at Concordia College, felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned around to find a young man she didn’t recognize holding up an ice—cream cone.

“He asked me if it was a red, yellow, or green,” says Ms. LeeCadwell, who realized the young man was a student at Concordia, where she has added color—coded labels to all dining-hall foods to inform students of fat content. Yellow means low fat (less than 5 grams), green indicates medium fat content (5 to 13 grams), and red is for high—fat foods (more than 13 grams).

“I told him it was a red, but that was OK, as long as it was in moderation,” says Ms. Lee-Cadwell, who is registered dietitian.

Perhaps it is an attempt to avoid gaining the dreaded “freshman 15,”1 but students around the country are demanding more information about the foods they’re served in dining halls, and they’re asking for a greater variety of healthy fare, according to college officials. Over the past few years, colleges have responded by hiring more dietitians and nutritionists and going to greater lengths to provide students with information about the caloric and fat content of the food they eat.

But despite the wealth of information, students don’t appear to be eating any healthier than their predecessors.

“They may be more health conscious, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re eating healthy,” says Robin L. Porter, the president of H. David Porter Associates Inc., an independent food consulting business based in Crofton, Maryland, that works with 70 colleges.

“They talk the talk, but don’t really walk the walk—french fries outsell apples by thousands and thousands of pounds.” Some even worry that the feast of information can be harmful, by feeding some students’ obsession with food.

Information and Options

Several colleges have recently purchased software called NetNutrition, from the Ithaca-based company CBord, which allows students to click through the dining-hall menus on their college’s Web site and learn the preparation method, ingredients, nutrients, and health information for every dish served.

For example, a student at the University of Southern California using the Web site one day this month could have chosen among Thai beef salad (144 calories 4.2 grams of fat), vegetarian sloppy joes (362 calories, 5.1 grams of fat), and Japanese spinach (at 47 calories, 1.9 grams of fat), or opted for classic American favorites like cheeseburgers (436 calories, 35.8 grams of fat) and pepperoni pizza (241 calories, 18 grams of fat), to name a few dishes. USC has even set up kiosks in one of its dining halls to allow students to check the Web site with their dinner trays in hand, and other colleges are installing similar kiosks.

Even at USC, however, pizza is still the most popular item, says Michael P. Gratz, the director of hospitality services. He says burgers and fries are being consumed as much as ever.

More Variety

It’s not that students lack food options. The university’s 29 dining halls boast condiment bars with kimchi and four different types of mayonnaise.

“Ethnic” foods and ingredients are also increasingly popular,” says Haddon Reines, vice president of health care and education for U.S.

FoodService Inc., a food distributor based in Columbia, Maryland.

“Students have grown up eating a wider array of foods, and it’s no longer uncommon for sushi to be in dining halls.”

Fries and a Coke

Still, the three items that top U.S. FoodService’s list of most frequently ordered foods are chicken tenders,“ french fries, and carbonated beverages. 12

“Some days I feel like I’m banging my head against a wall,”13 says Ms.

Lee—Cadwell of Concordia, which is also setting up electronic kiosks.

“The students talk out of both sides of their mouths. They say they want nutrition and variety, but then they gravitate to their familiar favorites—the pizza, the burgers, and the fried chicken strips.” Or they take an opposite approach, nutrition experts say, and become so preoccupied with food that they barely eat anything.

“There definitely seems to be two extremes,” says Stephanie I-Ioivath, a. senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “A lot of people eat the burgers and fries and then there are people who grasp onto what they think is healthy and don’t eat balanced meals.

Ms. Horvath recalls that her two roommates freshman year would brag about how “good” they had been on a given day because they ate nothing but a piece of bread. Another friend ate only salads, and “couldn’t figure out why she always had stomach aches and digestive problems,” says Ms. Horvath.

What Ms. Horvath and many college dietitians and nutritionists observe is part of a national trend. Although it is difficult to say what percentage of college students have eating disorders” or struggle with obesity,“ many college nutritionists say they notice a growing number of students splitting into two camps of unhealthy eaters: overweight fast-food junkies, or obsessive dieters, who either binge and purge” or nearly starve themselves.

“It’s sort of like everything else in our country,” says Christine D.

Economos, an assistant professor of nutrition at Tufts University who specializes in the study of college students’ eating habits.

“There’s a public health crisis with obesity, and there’s also more eating disorders, and in both cases the underlying cause is the same in that it’s emotional and started before they set foot on campus.” Striving for Moderation

The problems of compulsive overeating and undereating” have the same underlying cause, health officials say: They both show an inability to eat in moderation. Consequently, experts like Ronda Bokram, the staff nutritionist at the student health center at Michigan State University, say the availability of nutritional information does little or nothing to influence students’ eating habits.

The students who should be paying attention to nutritional information are ignoring it, Ms. Bokram says, while the ones that pay attention care too much.

“I would do anything to get rid of things like kiosks,” says Ms.

Bokram. “I have students say they won’t eat foods that have a certain amount of fat grams in them, and thats just unhealthy. I think giving students that information sends the wrong message. lt’s important to teach people to eat without labels.”

Students tend to disagree. Lindsey McAdams, a senior at Meredith College, in Raleigh, N.C., says that she wishes the dining halls at her college provided such information. If it had been available, she adds, it might have helped her make more informed eating decisions her freshman year, when she gained more than 30 pounds.

And Ms. Horvath, at Chapel Hill, points out that such information is no different from labels on foods in the supermarket.

“If they’re going to make it mandatory for you to be on meal plan, they have an obligation to tell you What’s in the food they’re serving,” she says.

Meanwhile, college nutritionists and dietitians will continue to emphasize moderation as a key to healthy eating, both at college and 120 beyond.

As Nancy Ellson, a nutritionist at William Paterson University, in Wayne, N.J., puts it: “It’s easy to give the students nutritional information, but it’s hard to impart to them the understanding that food is the one thing they have to make peace With in their lives.

Unlike other things they may develop addictions to, food is the one thing they cant give up for the rest of their lives.