Students forget nutritional lessons

I’ve spent a fair amount of time around college students, so I’ve come to regard myself as something of an expert on the species.

College students are particularly intriguing this time of year when they return to campus after a summer at home. For the past three months most college students have had their laundry done for them, and they’ve been sleeping on clean sheets and eating regularly and well. But during the next couple of weeks they’ll be making the slide from a life of relative order to one of chaos. The first thing to go is the diet.

Parents probably have a pretty good idea how badly their children eat when they go to college, but there’s undoubtedly a bit of denial involved, too. The parent who buys a meal plan for a student assumes the child will actually show up to eat all that nutritious food.

This is, in a word, foolish. The Baker University cafeteria, for example, is a desolate place at 8 a.m., with university employees easily outnumbering dining students. In fact, breakfast is so not a part of the average college student’s schedule that it’s a serve-yourself affair. Cereal and bagels are available all day. Even so, I don’t see many more students in there at 10 a.m.

Parents also assume that the many nutritional lessons they have imparted over the years have stuck like Velcro and that their college students will make prudent dietary choices. Strong body, sound mind and all that.

Parents who think this are deluded. My own college student pointed this out to me one day when he finished off a bag of potato chips and a soft drink while telling me, in a moment of intense piety, that he had given up red meat for health reasons. College students have no sense of irony.

What they do have is their own set of recognized food groups: ramen noodles, fast food, beer and other. This diet, not the high-carb menu in the cafeteria, is the cause of the “freshman 15,” the weight-gain phenomenon that afflicts sophomores, juniors and seniors, too.

In many respects, this is a lifestyle issue. Students eat on the fly. If scheduled meals are available to them, they often don’t get there. In some respects, this is really very odd because the life of a college student is fairly regimented. For a good portion of the day, a college student is following a strict schedule, yet eating often falls through the cracks.

Because they miss meals, students snack constantly and they frequently eat late at night. What’s available to them on their peculiar schedule is usually high in calories and everything else. Many college students don’t really exercise, so the pizza they eat at midnight has nowhere to go but the waistline.

I was thinking about these issues the other evening, waiting for my food in a Lawrence restaurant. Seated all around us were out-of-town parents who had brought their kids to school. Judging by the body language, most of these parents were having those last-minute conversations that parents have on such occasions. I feel certain that somewhere in the room some parent was reminding a college student to eat his vegetables.