Freshman Rebecca Smoot started her first year of college this fall at the University of Georgia. Leaving her hometown of Westfield, New Jersey, and starting a new stage of life at the opposite end of the East coast was quite daunting.
She encountered new people, a new community and a new culture. The adjustment to eating at a dining hall everyday instead of her kitchen at home was the cherry on top.
For her first college meal, Smoot visited the largest food services facility at Georgia: the Bolton Dining Hall.
Located in the middle of campus, the massive, redbrick complex forms a triangular shape with the right-angle corner placed at the intersection of campus’s two busiest roads, Lumpkin and Baxter streets. Here lies the main entrance, in the shape of a rotunda towering above the busy intersection.
Floor-to-ceiling windows line the two-story building and expose a slew of students: some cramming for tests as they eat, others eagerly chatting away with friends, even more bustling between the hall’s 12 food counters.
As she walked in, Smoot felt overwhelmed. So many tables full of people she didn’t know. So many rows of bottomless food trays.
But Bolton can be overwhelming for just about anyone.
There’s the salad bar to the right of the entrance. Turn around to see heat lamps illuminating a platter of fried chicken and mac and cheese. Cereal in clear chutes stretch up toward the rafters of Bolton’s tall ceilings, full of different colors and shapes.
Upstairs, is the breakfast bar with a line on one side for made-to-order omelets and another on the other side for pancakes. Keep walking past a counter of Asian food, a pasta bar next to that, a deli counter and then a taco station to reach an old-school-diner-inspired corner with checkered tile and a menu with shakes, burgers and onion rings.
Smoot wandered around Bolton for twenty minutes before sitting down with her plate. She looked down at the meal she had just assembled: French fries and chicken wings.
“For such an unhealthy meal, it took way too long,” Smoot said.
Smoot is one of the 20.4 million college students in the US this year who will face the task of juggling an education and providing a well-balanced diet to maintain good health. She, and the millions of other college freshmen, take on the commonly rumored, widely feared “freshman 15.”
The first year of college is often associated with weight gain in young adults. Multiple studies prove the idea is substantiated. But as time goes on, the amount of weight gained on average decreases year after year.
What was once the “freshman 15” is now more realistically the “freshman five.” Although weight gain is slowly lessening, students still face a number of other nutritional troubles. With college comes the new responsibility of independently structuring an everyday diet. Not considering the gravity of this responsibility can pose risk for nutritional deficiencies that can lead to future health problems.
Understanding the nutritional struggles students face when transitioning from living at home to living on their own can combat diminishing health in college.
‘You don’t have your mom there’
Ayshia Ranjitsingh, a fourth-year dietetics and sociology double-major and president of the Student Dietetic Association, lived in Hill Hall her freshman year. The dormitory houses about 160 residents and provides a number of amenities, including a laundry facility on the basement floor. One night, Ranjitsingh remembered watching another freshman attempt to do his first load of laundry at the washer next to hers. He struggled to work out where the detergent went, what button to press when and what dial to turn where.
“He didn’t know if he should sort the whites or the colors,” Ranjitsingh said. “He didn’t know how to do anything. And I think it’s the same sort of thing with food.”
Much like struggling to master the art of laundry for the first time, freshmen face the challenge of navigating the dining hall’s smorgasbord of possibilities to master the art of a balanced diet.
Coming to college, some students build their own meals for the first time in their lives. Here they are, with this new-found freedom wandering somewhere between the pasta bar and the taco stand.
But maybe this liberty isn’t so much of a freedom, as it is a responsibility with heavy consequences. Weight is not the only worry; other nutritional concerns pose threat to students’ health. On average, college students tend to be low on the suggested servings of vegetables, calcium and iron.
For Smoot, the easy access to foods she didn’t regularly have access to at home is one of the hardest adjustments. At home, her parents avoided keeping ice cream in the house. Out of sight, out of mind.
Here, every dining hall flaunts multiple dessert options, all day every day.
Smoot said she picked her meals at Bolton based on what she had a hankering for that day, but access to so much food for an indecisive person like her made things difficult.
Maybe a burrito bowl with queso. Add a side of chicken wings. One scoop of ice cream for dessert. Grab that cookie, too.
“You can have a little bit of everything,” Smoot said. “Then it turns into three meals in one trip.”
Ranjitsingh said the options at Bolton were something “easy to fall prey to.” Especially when stressed out.
“You don’t have your mom there to make sure you’re eating your vegetables or saying you can’t have a second serving of this until you do that,” Ranjitsingh said. “Because of the stress levels, it’s easy to overeat.”
Creating a regulated food regimen can be unnerving when thrown into it blind. Almost like doing laundry for the first time.
‘Mindless eating’
It’s a late night at the library. Smoot is studying with friends, when someone throws out an idea.
“Let’s order pizza.”
“You don’t really need pizza,” Smoot tells herself. She ate dinner just a couple of hours ago and she’s not even hungry. But then someone orders and it’s only $3 a person. Push comes to shove, and Smoot’s three-slices deep.
Food can take on a social role. When new friends suggest ordering Insomnia cookies, the easy answer is yes. Then there’s a club meeting and they have free pizza. It would be rude not to eat a slice, right?
“It’s so easy to overindulge and that’s a danger a lot of people face when they first get to college,” Ranjitsingh said. “I definitely did.”
“That’s the word I was going to use: overindulgence,” responded Dr. Emma Laing, the Director of Dietetics at Georgia. “And not having the limits on either side.”
Dr. Laing also oversees the Student Dietetics Association. Her and Ranjitsingh work together to offer opportunities for Dietetics students to further their experiences in the field with on-campus nutritional outreach programs.
At the other end of campus, Katherine Ingerson, Georgia’s Registered Dietician, provides students on meal plan with nutrition counseling. She sees a lot of students every day at her office near the front entrance to Bolton who voice their struggles with what she calls “mindless eating.” She sees such habits as one of the biggest dangers students can fall into.
“If you’re just eating because you’re bored or studying, or as you walk out the dining hall and see a cookie and just grab it,” Ingerson said. “I think that tends to be the problem most people face.”
‘Just jumping on a bandwagon’
Students often see weight gain as the first sign of deteriorating health. This misinterpretation can lead to poor nutritional decisions.
“Sometimes people have this mindset of fighting against what is naturally supposed to happen as they transition from adolescence into adulthood,” Ingerson said.
Human development is a lifelong process extending past puberty. Physical maturation typically doesn’t reach completion until after the age of 18. Students don’t reach full height or complete the growth of secondary sexual characteristics, such as size of penis and breasts, until well into college.
Ingerson said it’s very natural to gain about five pounds as the body matures in this stage of life.
Sometimes students don’t realize that. Men’s bodies fill out to catch up with their height. Women develop more curves. Weight is gained and fear arises, so they turn to quick fixes rumored to work wonders.
“Fad diets [are] another trigger to worry about,” said Laing. “Students looking for something quick and easy to keep their bodies the same .. so you may be more susceptible to just jumping on a bandwagon.”
The Mayo Clinic, an esteemed medical research facility in Minnesota, defined a fad diet as a diet that “promises a weight loss of 10 pounds for the person who follows the plan for 12 days.”
Juicing, paleo, diet pills, tea detoxes. Such diets often put restrictive limits on participants’ daily food intake with the promise of leading to a more slender figure. Pounds shed quickly and appetite is curbed.
Fad diets typically only allow the consumption of a few basic foods. Food groups seen as fattening are often purged, like carbohydrates.
“Anything that eliminates an entire food group without telling you how to get the nutrients in some other way is a red flag,” Laing said.
Laing has seen a lot of success stories with people who turn to restrictive diets for reasons like religious beliefs or athletic aspirations. There was a common denominator among those stories: knowledge.
Lack of knowledge of what resources the body needs and how to replace nutrients cut out by a certain diet can lead to serious damage. The body loses out on a significant portion of what makes it tick. This adds stress to the body and results in a game of catch up.
“Dieting works for anyone that follows it,” Laing said. “But can [this diet] sustain your body for the long term?”
‘A well-balanced day’
It’s halfway through her freshman year, and Smoot has made some changes.
“Now, I try to focus on having a well-balanced day,” she said.
She’s not a huge veggie person. She’d rather an apple or banana over spinach, but vegetables are growing on her.
Most days she’ll make a salad for lunch. And if she doesn’t, she’ll add some green to her dinner plate. Her second semester resolutions include expanding her food repertoire to incorporate a wider variety of vegetables into her daily meals.
Lucky for her, Georgia’s dining services are at the forefront of nutrition.
In 1994, they were one of the first universities to hire a dietician on food service staff. University of Louisville, North Caroline State, University of Massachusetts and still others admit to replicating them. Both the US Olympic Committee and the US Military have visited campus to see how to model their own practices after them.
As the current dietician on staff, Ingerson’s job entails working with bulk food distributors to provide for the dining halls. She’s made it her goal to find healthy options to everyday meals, so students can make little substitutions to benefit their health.
Quite a challenge when serving tens of thousands a week with a restrictive list of what foods are available in bulk.
Her first success on the job was the acquisition of whole wheat pasta. Right now, she’s working on providing almond milk.
“You wouldn’t think it’s that big of a deal because it’s all over grocery stores, but for us it can be a real nightmare because we just consume so much,” Ingerson said.
Georgia offers endless opportunities to better students’ nutrition.
Students on a meal plan can schedule nutrition counseling sessions with Ingerson for free. Every food in the dining halls is presented with a full nutrition profile, which can also be found online at Georgia’s own ‘Build Your Plate’ website. At the University Health Center, students can pay $5 for a cooking class at one of the first teaching kitchens on a college campus in the nation. Peer nutrition educators, dietetic students who earn class credit to partake in nutritional campus outreach, offer a variety of free services, like going grocery shopping with students.
In a matter of days, freshmen college students face a multitude of new stressors: a big move, new friends, further distance from family, harder classes. New responsibilities arise, from something crucial like paying rent to the smallest of chores like laundry. On top of that, remaining health-conscious when there’s unlimited access to crave-worthy food plays another important role in the college student’s everyday life.
And avoiding the temptation to go for chicken wings and fries every night, which can be especially tough.
Lauren D'Ambra 