College students cannot be left to develop their eating habits by only trusting themselves, their bodies, and their needs. Moreover, the larger population of college students are young adults right in the middle of their adult character formative years, and apart from a need to remain healthy now, attitudes and practices adopted at this point in life will greatly influence their pattern of life in the future. Interventions within the college environment to nurture a healthy-eating student body are ideas that should be incorporated in every institution, as trusting them, their bodies, and their needs will only add to the number of the unhealthy in an already unhealthy American nation.
In an already unhealthy American population, constantly obsessed with orchestrated eating healthy paradoxes, disseminating the right information from unbiased food scientists who understand college students’ age and environment is paramount. Information from corporate entities or their funded protégées, together with information from journalism, has done a great job in coming up with the confusion that has become of our healthy and unhealthy eating discussion. Consequently, myths and heresies have occupied what ought to be a clear discussion on our nation’s health. Therefore, efforts to demystify and unlearn opinions held among college students, especially on processed foods and snacks, among other things, are of utmost importance. Processed food companies invest colossal resources in product development and will spare no effort in frustrating anyone to enlighten on the detrimental effects of their otherwise market-perfect products. Frequent open forums and other forms of disseminating the correct information where students gain an unbiased understanding of healthy and unhealthy eating choices can never be overstressed.
College administrations need to arrange frequent health checkups and medical and nutritional advisory clinics as a norm for their students. In such clinics, health experts can assess individual students’ health status and give personally useful advice on diet, weight, and health. Moreover, a culture of eating for health as a departure from the historical American experience of eating to fuel our bodies will be cultivated. America is stalked by diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, all conditions associated with our eating habits and our waistlines. Consequently, the burden of the management of the conditions has continued to drain the coffers, with even the incidence of COVID-19, heart disease, and cancer alone causing about 40% of total deaths of Americans in 2022(Hacker, 2024) Ingraining frequent health checkups and medical and nutrition advice and awareness among college students will cultivate a lifestyle of the same practice in the future which will act as a measure for preventive health and at its best be a reversal for the progression of the disorders otherwise known as lifestyle diseases.
With support from the administration, the student body can establish a structured support system for students with food-related challenges. Society has biased views on health when it comes to thinness and fatness, among other physical attributes. Consequently, cultural misconceptions have attributed a healthy body as slim and a thick one as unhealthy and vice versa, giving rise to cultural barriers and pressures that often give rise to detrimental eating disorders like anorexia. Moreover, eating ‘morality’ has become the norm as there are good and bad food. Apart from creating awareness of nutrition health in the institution, the support system will bring together students with weight challenges and other socially biased attributes for assistance and support. In addition, with support from the administration, professional medical help and support can be availed to those in need.
Essentially, we cannot expect to continue to exist and aspire to thrive if we continue to eat as we have customarily been eating, reasons notwithstanding. It is unfortunate that now it is acceptable to eat for social or emotional reasons. Such an argument is fundamentally misplaced, especially when we consider the social and economic burden the country is grappling with due to the effects of disorders associated with weight and diet. It is time that eating healthy was integrated, especially in the growth and development systems of our younger population, if for anything, to arrest the errant trends. It is immoral for companies to fail to provide comprehensive dietary information on their products. Moreover, it is unethical for corporate manufacturers to have media advertisements that are technically coined to address minors who may not have the capacity to make informed decisions on the view of health repercussions.
In 2021, there were 16.6 million undergraduate students besides 4.6 million in graduate colleges in America (Fabina et al.), making the college student body a force that can mold a better, healthier population in years to come. With the health burden set to grow with time due to the increased incidence of lifestyle diseases, integrating ideas in our institutions of higher learning is a tool that we can use to change the whole American landscape of healthy foods and healthy eating habits. Moreover, trying to bring together manufacturers to mind the health of their consumers has proved futile. Equipping our college students with the right information on eating healthy will go a long way to enable quite a sizeable number of our population to make conscious, healthy eating decisions.
References
Hacker, Karen. “The Burden of Chronic Disease.” Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Innovations, Quality & Outcomes 8.1 (2024): 112-119.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocpiqo.2023.08.005
Fabina, Jacob, Erik L. Hernandez, and Kevin McElrath. “School enrollment in the United States: 2021.” (2023).
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2023/acs/acs-55.pdf
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