It's back to school time. One of the challenges that college students will face in such time of year is to manage your lifestyle, especially developing or maintaining healthy eating habits. This will be more challengeable for the freshmen who have been accustomed to the school meal service or mom-prepared meals and so don’t know what to do with the sudden freedom of choice for what you eat.
College students would experience a lot of social gatherings in a new semester, which will frequently end up with drinking alcohols. Although moderate drinking would not be a big problem - it has been suggested even to be beneficial to health in some aspects-, heavy drinking is clearly unhealthful. Alcohol contains non-nutritive calories, which means what it provides is only 7 kcal/g, but not any other nutrients. Alcohol can also limit the chances for consuming others foods containing nutritive calories. These explain why the persistent consumption of alcohol leads to the deprivation of nutrients essential for life. Heavy drinking is associated with a reduced longevity and an increased risk of many diseases. Binge drinking within a few hours may fatally toxic in some individuals. This may remind you that college students who die every year in alcohol-related incidents are not a few.
Many of the college students, especially female students, put much effort to lose weights. Such effort would be desirable if you are overweight or obese. But it is problematic if you are normal or even underweight but still try to lose your weights. You can simply assess whether you weigh normal or not by calculating Body Mass Index (BMI) that are your body weight in kilogram divided by the square of your height in meters. If your BMI is in the range of 18.5-22.9, you are normal. If your BMI is less than 18.5, you are underweight. If your BMI is over 23 or 25, you are overweight or obese, respectively. When you try to lose your weights, you may limit the consumption of simple sugars and fats. Also eat a variety of vegetables sufficiently to meet the requirement of vitamins and minerals. No matter what BMI you have, you are better to consume diverse foods. Imbalanced diet and irregular eating are not helpful at all in any of the occasions.
College students spend much time outside and frequently eat out. Many students also feel busy during a semester and conveniently choose to eat instant foods. Then, one of the things that you would like to consider is the sodium consumption. Sodium is an essential nutrient when consumed in an adequate amount, which is about 2g per day, but detrimental for health if over-consumed continuously. For example, many of the instant noodles at only one serving size often contain more than 2g. You need to plus additional 0.3-0.5g if you eat it with kimchi at the one serving size. Such a meal easily exceeds the daily requirement of sodium. Then the rest two meals need to be sodium-free not to over-consume sodium in the day, which is not easy to be realized in real diet.
Chungbuk National University offers ‘Ubiquitous Health Care’ program (http://cuh.chungbuk.ac.kr/), which helps you evaluate your diet and nutritional status. Several ‘Food and Nutrition’ courses are open in every semester, which help you acquire basic knowledge necessary for managing healthy diet. However, the most important thing is the self-determination to develop or maintain healthy eating habits. Keep in mind that your eating habits developed in this transitional period can be permanent and have great impact on your health. New semester begins. Now is the time for you to determine to develop lifelong healthy eating habits.