Nowadays, there are many negative associations with college dietary and weight issues - the "freshman 15" being one of the most infamous. Many students began school with the big fear of packing on the pounds during winter, but that weight simply became accepted as added warmth that's necessary for the freezing walk to Cooper Science Complex in the morning. But their acceptance might also be common because healthy meals are few and far between in campus dining facilities.
Many dining facilities share common themes: walls of caffeinated and sugary drinks and the pungent smell of greasy foods. There are also masses of chips and candy bars everywhere. Junk food has never been more accessible - or unavoidable.
Sure, there are some choice selections across campus. There are places with salad bars and places with sandwich shops to create your own healthy meals. But these places alone are definitely not enough to support everyday healthy eating without getting tired of the food. Who wants to eat the same things all the time?
To assist students with healthy eating on campus, Dining Services developed the Health Zone. This program offers different alternatives to meal planning based on a color-coded labeling system, and it promotes goals in low fat, low calorie and low carbohydrate food intake, as well as tips on exercising.
The Health Zone has some downfalls, though.
According to the Health Zone page of the Ball State University Web site, a key point of the program's purpose is to encourage students to "eat foods rich in nutrients." The nutrients are listed along with their primary benefits and suggested foods to eat.
But the problem with the suggested foods is they are not easily available. For example, the list of proteins includes "red meat, skinless poultry, fish, eggs and dried beans." These foods are offered on campus, but are not consistently available everywhere. I, for one, do not want to have to visit a bunch of different locations to get what is required - or even just to keep from getting sick of the food. Maybe the ingenious aspect the Health Zone plan is to make foods available at random locations, so students will loose weight from traveling to several dining halls every day.
Time is another contributing factor to this. Many students do not have the time to count calories or search for labeled foods. The majority of students line up to be served quickly before their next engagements.
Many weight and health issues can be avoided with dedication, but that requires the time to do so. When there is not enough time, all students have to turn to is what they are surrounded by. And when the selection of junk food outweighs that of healthy food multiple times, that situation alone almost completely dictates the decision of what to eat.
"I always try to eat healthy, but there is a lack of variety of not only healthy food, but food in general," freshman Christopher Sexton said. "Most of the time, I usually give in to junk food, and you could say I've fallen victim to the freshman 15."
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