Nutrition crash course
MOST of us look back on our college years as some of the best years of our lives -- or some of the healthiest, at least. But students at the University of New Hampshire are learning that they are not as healthy as they assumed.
Undergraduates enrolled in a course called “Nutrition 400” at the Durham, N.H., campus kept an online food journal, analyzed glucose and lipid levels and calculated their bone densities. Their results, presented in May at the annual meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, indicate that college students don’t get enough fruit, vegetables, fiber or exercise. More than 50% of female students surveyed were lacking folate (which prevents birth defects during pregnancy), while the majority of male students had higher-than-recommended LDL cholesterol levels.
Although 81% of males and 90% of females said nutrition was “very important” to them, more than 40% of the students skipped at least four meals a week. And 12% of students already displayed three of the five symptoms of metabolic syndrome, putting them at risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Course instructor Jesse Morrell says UNH hopes to offer the program as a model to other universities.
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