Eating healthy at college? Professor Deborah Murray says it’s possible

Professor Deborah Murray

College students often have the reputation of being binge drinkers, fast-food connoisseurs, and late-night eaters. However, there is some optimism about America’s rising adults, emphasized by Deborah Murray, an assistant professor at Ohio University.

Murray’s academic interests are health and wellness, particularly preventive wellness as it relates to school health. She serves on health teams in the area and oversees school nutrition. Besides an instructional background, she also has experience with clinical care, long-term consulting, and working with WIC.

Her daily interactions with college students in the classroom have given her extensive insight into their nutritional lives–uncovering both positive and negative truths.

“College kids do a lot of things right,” she said, adding that many students make healthy choices like drinking plenty of water, scheduling exercise, and eating whole grain cereals and high fiber bars.

She explained that the malnutrition of many college students are often a product of circumstances, and not necessarily choices.

“[College kids are] in a unique time of life when [they] don’t have full control over [their] food supply,” she said. Murray emphasized that often students are “friendly captives” of the system, an institutionalized one in which financial constraints curtail the availability of healthy foods.

“It’s not like you can go get a bowl of kiwi and strawberries anytime you want to,” Murray said.

However, she added that the invincible mentality of twenty-somethings can also contribute to the problem.

“There is a belief that you’re young, you’ll live forever, and you can get by eating junky and feel perfectly fine,” she said.

Murray also discussed the proverbial “Freshman 15,” indicating that she believes it is a legitimate phenomenon. She said that the combination of radical life changes and a shifting social life can have significant impacts on students’ eating habits, causing weight gain.

“Typically lots of calories come in from the wrong places late at night. Emotional eating because of academic stress is also a factor,” she added.

Processed foods were at the top of Murray’s list when it came to poor habits espoused by students. She described a project she assigns in her nutrition classes where the students track their eating habits for three days. The results always have a similar trend in which processed foods are the culprit.

” A consistent common thread is that sodium is high,” she said.

Another group of foods that Murray advised limiting was fast food. She said that if students decrease their consumption, and opt for healthier options when they do eat at “burger joints,” they would reap many healthy benefits. Even today, fast food restaurants are certainly not the best choice for healthy eaters, she said.

“I think fast food industry has made significant strides in having offerings, but they’re also a business and mainly looking for a profit,” she said.

As a nutrition expert, Murray also emphasized her distaste for fast-food ploys, especially those like Burger King’s “Windows 7 Whopper.”

“I just thought, are you serious?” she said, describing her reaction the the product. Murray was also disappointed that many fast food restaurants seem to battle each other to create a burger that’s cooler than the competitor’s, resulting in such monstrous constructions as the Baconator.

“I would love to go back to the regular plain hamburger and French fries that were of old,” she laughed.

Murray also listed several tips for students who want to make healthy changes in their diet:

1. Eat Fresh: “Plant-based foods are a huge thing.”

2. Eat whole: “Pick things that say ‘whole grains’ at least half the time.”

3. Drink low-fat milk: “Having milk in your diet twice a day is so important.”

4. Choose meats wisely: “Fatty cuts of meat can be a big downfall.”

Studying nutrition was another important aspect of college that Murray endorsed. “When you have to come to class and devote four hours of your life to be immersed in this stuff… it plants seeds,” she said. Murray also explained that this is a very pivotal time to study nutrition, since lifetime eating habits are usually founded in the early 20′s.

“What you have to gain health-wise from establishing those habits now is huge,” she said.

Unlike their parents, today’s college kids have plenty of online resources to consult when it comes to nutrition.

For example, Suite101.com has many articles pertaining to college health including dining hall nutrition tips, maintaining a healthy diet, and avoiding the freshman fifteen.

Many of the site’s food suggestions match very closely with Professor Murray’s:

• Fresh fruit
• Salad Bars
• Whole Grains
• Water
• Cereal
• Low-fat condiments
• Low-fat or fat-free frozen yogurt

Furthermore, many restaurant sites let consumers calculate the nutrition information of different foods they offer, such as Chipotle or Pita Pit.

Although university students may still have a poor nutritional reputation, people like Deborah Murray feel that not only is there hope, but that many students are already moving in the right direction. She said that since the life of a college kid is bombarded with many stressors and responsibilities, eating healthy is especially necessary to help a student maintain  overall well-being.

“If you can be your best self physically, everything else just kinda falls into place,” she said.