Nutrition Week

24

Author: Linni Kral

Most days I have very few complaints about the Marketplace. They do a great job providing a multitude of options and always have alternatives for vegetarians. They also recently featured a fantastic Nutrition Week during lunch. I am having trouble understanding, however, why we only have one week out of an entire year dedicated to nutrition. Shouldn’t the school promote healthy eating habits year-round?

The nutrition labels that were posted for every prepared item that week were incredible and gave students the opportunity to choose what best fit their dietary needs at that specific meal. Yes, the information is usually available online, but students cannot be expected to check the Marketplace menu and subsequent nutrition facts online for every meal-it makes more sense to post them alongside the food items themselves. I doubt the students who order fish and chips on a weekly basis know that they contain half of the calories the average person should consume in one day.

During the week, students who usually stay away from the high-calorie pizzas (the average has upwards of 1000 calories and 20 grams of fat) were enjoying smaller pizzas on wheat pita with low-fat cheese. I can assure you that if the nutrition facts were posted alongside the regular pizza, you wouldn’t get half as many people eating it. We should be using low-fat cheese on a regular basis, especially since vegetarian dishes often substitute cheese as a source of protein.

More effort was also put into the prepared salads. The long lines that usually form for fried items instead formed for the amazing dried pear and brie salad that was offered, as well as some stellar soups. Students were given incentive to get excited about healthy eating and that is something we should work to promote throughout the year.

It will of course be argued that there just isn’t enough time or money to provide this healthy atmosphere in the Marketplace on a regular basis, but what about the meal plan money that every student has leftover at the end of each semester? We can obviously afford to be charged more, so if an increase in cafeteria prices is needed to meet nutritional standards, then so be it. You can’t put a price on our health and the cafeteria is in a position to get us started on the right path as we enter adulthood. No one wants to come away from college with a heart problem just because they didn’t know the chocolate muffins they loved so much had 112 mg of cholesterol and more than 500 calories.

I am not saying we need to get rid of these items, because everyone has those bad days when they feel like they need pizza or a muffin to survive. I am only suggesting we make students aware of what they are putting in their bodies on a daily basis, and maybe give them some sinfully delicious food to eat on those crappy days.

Linni is a sophomore Politics major and a Contributing Editor for the Weekly. She can be reached at lkral@oxy.edu

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