The Freshman 15

With the new college year starting, it is timely to consider the diet and weight of our young students.

From this Wikipedia page, one can learn that there is much controversy about the so-called "freshman 15," the notion that college freshmen tend to gain weight due to unhealthy eating habits, poor food choices, alcohol consumption, stress and other overall unhealthy habits.

There seems be a disconnect between studies on the topic, personal anecdotal observations and common sense interpretations of this topic.

My own person experience living away at college - oh those many years ago - is more consistent with the anecdotal observations than with anything else.  Besides the poor everyday habits (little rest, lack of consistent schedule, partying), and the typical consumption of pizza and soda, the truth of the matter was that the dining hall food was horrendous.

The best meal of the day was breakfast, and there the healthiest choices were eggs, hash browns, bacon sausage, white toast with butter and/or jelly, and oatmeal.  At least some of the egg meals tasted reasonably well, as long as the eggs did not feel not "rubbery".

Lunch was a step down in quality, but was still halfway edible - typically the healthiest choices (the adjective "healthy" is in a relative, not absolute, sense) were a bowel of salty soup and a hamburger with cheap gristle-filled meat.

But breakfast and lunch paled compared to the horrors of dinner.  Yegads!  Some sort of unidentifiable, tough meat, drowned in vomit-like "sauce," accompanied by plastic-like frozen vegetables, stale bread, maybe a salad with wilted lettuce and sugar-laden dressing.

At some point, the dining service started serving cereal and ice cream as a main meal for dinner - the students would line up in front of huge bins filled with Captain Crunch, before moving on the the ice cream dispensers.  The cereal was the main meal and the ice cream was the dessert, or vice versa, I can't remember.

So, the tastiest choices were relatively unhealthy, and the overall lousy quality prompted students to order from outside: the usual pizza with the ever present bottle of soda.  After the pizza, the next item on the agenda was partying and beer drinking.  Weight gain?  Are we surprised?