Health and Nutrition on College Campuses

While in college, students are developing habits that can last a lifetime. One of the most overlooked yet impactful habits that students develop in college revolve around food. On college campuses, students suddenly find themselves in the position of being more independent in their food decisions. At the same time, students may not be surrounded by food decisions that are not particularly nutritious. Many college students ultimately eat unhealthy food because of its accessibility as well as with the freedom to do so.

Public health nutrition is a continuous matter that needs to be addressed, whether in college or not.

Through extensive research on public health nutrition, many articles discuss similar topics regarding the accessibility of healthy food on college campuses. In College Food Needs to Get Better, this PHA initiative is Helping, the article explains the issues with finding healthy food, specifically within dining halls at college campuses. Lee also reported how the Partnership for Healthier America is working to amend this problem.

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The scope of the problem is many students develop long-lasting habits in college that may carry on into adult life. If students are accustomed to unhealthy food options, this could contribute to obesity or diet-related chronic issues later in life, which are increasingly alarming issues within our country. Also, this article shows how public health fights issues like ours, through initiatives like the Partnership for Healthier America (Lee, 2018).

Public health nutrition affects everyone in the world; however, with our focus on the accessibility of healthy food on college campuses, we are only looking at undergraduate students.

Being independent for the first time in their lives and making their own choices about what they eat and how often they exercise can be a continuous struggle for many college students. The universities and colleges around the country provide food for their students and most of the time, it’s not nutritious. In addition, many students don’t leave the time for physical activity. A combination of the two will push college students to lead an extremely unhealthy lifestyle.

Along with the countless organizations that focus on public health nutrition, there are also community organizations in proximity to the students of the University of Miami. For example, the Florida Department of Health continues to focus on this issue by implementing the School Health Plan. The program strives to promote healthy, lifelong behaviors and to prevent disease through health education (School Health Plan, n.d.). The School Health philosophy is that prevention and education are the keys to improved health and educational outcomes.

The Miami-Dade County Health Department, Miami-Dade County Public Schools and numerous caring partners have pledged to safeguard the physical and mental health and well-being of the students by providing the best possible school health services (American College Health Association, n.d.). Healthy U, Healthy Me is an organization through the University of Miami that focuses on changing the lives of students and communities by changing the context of health education and care. Also, the organization integrates a health curriculum into the education of adolescents.

Healthy U, Healthy me can provide the community with information such as what they are directly doing on campus and in the Miami area to spread awareness to public health and nutrition. This organization is right at our fingertips and we can use this example of a direct action being taken to improve nutrition on college campuses (Healthy U, Healthy Me, n.d.).

In addition to the successful solutions stated above, one example of an effective intervention is posting the calorie count of food items on the menus of fast-food restaurants. In this study, the population addressed was college students purchasing food from fast-food restaurants at a southern university’s food court. The results were that participants order significantly fewer calories when selecting from the labeled menu compared to the menu without the labels. Hunger and cost were barriers to using the calorie information. If students can overcome barriers, calorie labeling could provide information that college students need to select lower-calorie items at fast food restaurants.

Another example of a successful intervention has to do with a student body campus nutrition resource on campus. The program at Western Kentucky University was created in order to encourage healthier food options being served on campus. The mission of the program is to essentially engage the WKU campus in a healthier nutritional environment with constant education and dialogue of these healthier practices. In order to achieve this goal, the program has provided the entire campus with educational information covering all nutritional information.

Furthermore, they have provided many resources on campus for students to utilize including one on one nutritional counseling, disordered eating support, food allergy consultant, medical nutrition therapy, etc. Despite this program being relatively new, the positive reaction from the students has been instant. Not only have they noticed the transformation of the food being offered, but they feel more knowledgeable about nutrition in general. This program has proved that it is simply not enough to just offer healthier options on campus to promote healthier eating habits (University, W. K., 2016). Rather, educating the students about nutrition is equally as important.

With this in mind, as students at the University of Miami, we believe that nutrition on our campus is a public health issue that needs to be further addressed. The University of Miami is partnered with the Healthier Campus Initiative to work on nutrition on our campus; however, many students are not aware of this partnership. There needs to be more aware of the resources such as healthy and affordable food options along with accessibility to various wellness programs. We believe that by bringing more awareness to these resources for students, the community of the University of Miami as a whole will improve.

Studies have shown that increasing education and availability are the most effective methods for improving diet choices in college students. Most would agree that the convenience of fast food is the primary reason unhealthy diets are so common among college students. With this in mind, mandatory informational online courses should be implemented at the University of Miami, so there is a baseline of education at the beginning of each students’ college career. As far as availability, there need to be major changes in dining hall menu options, as well as in food courts on campus in terms of increasing the number of healthier restaurants. In addition, building more walking and biking paths on campuses will encourage a more active lifestyle (Cimino, 2018). Overall, public health nutrition is an ongoing issue that we should focus on for the rest of our lives.