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Do College Diners Reinforce Bad Eating Choices?

College diner plans can potentially make you overweight.

By Ana NavarroPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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Gooey melted cheese pizzas. Hearty, juicy burgers with unlimited fries. Ice cream swirls with flowing rivers of hot fudge syrup and a dash of colorful sprinkles. And then there’s a salad: cold, unprepared, and DIY. Honestly, which one would you choose?

When I first walked in a college diner, I was dazzled with the modern feel, colorful displays, and all the food choices presented. I confess, I took a little bit of everything. My plate was mounted, brimming and practically spilling all over. A few weeks later, I started the semester and I was required to have a meal plan at these college diners. Since I’d be eating there for a year, I had plenty of time to examine my food choices. With a closer inspection, I realized foods in college diners are a hotspot for bad eating choices. Although there are different stations such as hot-like-home meals, salad bars, and a sandwich bar — the fact of the matter is those stations don’t stand a chance to the other departments of unhealthy foods available if unprepared.

It seems reasonable for lunch ladies and lunch lords to cook food college students would want to eat, but at the same time, the give-them-what-they-want approach backfires. The majority of what college diners serve are not only unhealthy, but addictive — addictive as in actually leading to similar withdrawals and intake abuse as drugs. In a PubMed journal titled Which Foods May Be Addictive? The Roles of Processing, Fat Content, and Glycemic Load, the researchers found pizza to rank number one in the addictive food scale, followed by chocolate, chips, cookies, ice cream, French fries, burgers, soda, cake, and breakfast cereals. Notice that college diners have these selections of addictive foods accessible every day to every other day. Of course they would beat the salad. Think about it, after a long day of classes, it’s unlikely anyone would settle for a few leafs of salad over a hefty meal of fatty meats, junk food, and straight-to-the-veins sugar. Which brings me to my next point, sugars available.

At college diners, there are a variety of sugary treats. College diners have an assortment of cookies and cereals to choose from, but unfortunately, these options are not truly varied in nutritional value or ingredients. When I observed the choices of cereals at my college diner, I was taken aback by the options of sugary cereals that were similar to Frosted Flakes, Honey Comb cereal, Fruit Loops, and Lucky Charms. The same goes for the cookie display assortments; there are lots of different kinds but they're mostly made the same way with related ingredients: peanut butter, chocolate chip, rainbow chocolate chip, double chocolate chip, and caramel chocolate chip cookies, and the same was found with the other displays of sweets such as the types of cupcakes and pies.

There is also something else that makes college diners unhealthy. The way that they function: buffet style. “The problem: Buffets offer limitless amounts of food, and much of it has tons of calories. Restaurants with big portions of delicious foods make it hard to push the plate away,” wrote Elizabeth Cohen in a CNN article "The moments that make us fat." With all the options, it’s really hard not to overeat. "Research shows that when faced with a variety of food at one sitting, people tend to eat more. It is the temptation of wanting to try a variety of foods that makes it particularly hard not to overeat at a buffet," says Rachel Begun, a dietitian and a spokeswoman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Now the question rises: what are students to do to make healthy choices at college diners? With the home-like meals and salad bars, it may seem obvious, but even if it’s obvious, it doesn’t make willpower easier. Studies suggest it comes down to strategy. Researchers found eating with chopsticks slows you down and makes you eat less, since it takes about 20 minutes for your stomach to signal your brain that it’s full. Another strategy is to sit in a booth with your back against the food. Lastly, research found that checking out all the sections before choosing what to eat helps you make better choices. At the end of the day, while the evidence does seem to point that college food diners are plotting to make you slip on the worst possible choices, (and gain freshman five, or fifteen!) you still do have a choice — but usually the choice is not always easy to take, just like the cold salad.

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About the Creator

Ana Navarro

Hi there! I'm Ana, and I have an insatiable curiosity and creative appetite. I love crafting up stories and articles that bring awareness to certain topics and enrich the mind.

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