deficits nutrition

Class reveals college students' nutrition deficits
Time for college students

to study habits

Most of us look back on our college years as some of the best of our lives – or at least some of the healthiest. But students at the University of New Hampshire are learning that they are not as healthy as they think.

Undergraduates enrolled in "Nutrition 400" at the Durham, N.H., campus kept an online food journal, analyzed glucose and lipid levels and calculated their bone densities. Their results, presented in May at the annual meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, indicate that college students don't get enough fruit, vegetables, fiber or exercise. More than half of the female students surveyed were lacking folate (which prevents birth defects during pregnancy), while the majority of male students had higher-than-recommended LDL cholesterol levels.

Although 81 percent of males and 90 percent of females said nutrition was "very important" to them, more than 40 percent of the students skipped at least four meals a week. And 12 percent of students already displayed three of the five symptoms of metabolic syndrome, putting them at risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Course instructor Jesse Morrell says UNH hopes to offer the program as a model to other universities.

source:www.dallasnews.com