St. Thomas is considering getting a system that would display nutritional information for food, but I don’t believe it’s necessary.
These days it’s incredibly easy to get nutritional information without spending any extra money.
If students really want to find out how many calories or grams of trans fat are in their food, they can go to the Internet. Sparkpeople.com is one example of a website that allows you to set up a free account where you can put in the name of almost any food and get the nutritional information. Simply Googling “how many calories are in a cheeseburger” turned up more than 1 million results.
With the increased awareness of healthy food choices during the past few years, people are more aware of what they should and shouldn’t eat.
It’s pretty easy to tell what foods are healthier: a salad is healthier than a piece of pizza; frozen yogurt is healthier than an ice cream sandwich.
Freshman Mara Morely agreed that students should be able to determine which foods are healthy.
“If you put your napkin on your food and it soaks something up, you should probably put it back,” she said.
The majority of St. Thomas students are at a healthy weight, according to the Wellness Center. A 2009 student health survey found 65 percent of St. Thomas students have a healthy body mass index, while 30 percent are overweight or obese.
More expensive
The program will cost between $20,000-$50,000, according to Todd Empanger, director of dining services, and will most likely require an additional full-time employee to manage the system. With tuition increasing, St. Thomas could spend students’ tuition dollars on more important endeavors than telling us how many calories are in our morning pancakes and eggs.
St. Thomas also offers many free ways to help students be healthier. The Wellness Center has a whole page dedicated to eating healthy on campus and a page labeled “Healthy Recipes – Beyond Mac & Cheese” with more than 50 links to healthy alternatives to the classic Easy Mac dinner.
Before investing in this kind of program, I think there should be some research done to see how many students would actually read the nutritional information and make healthier eating choices because of it.
The idea of a nutritional information system is not a bad one, but there are enough free resources out there to make the expensive system unnecessary.
Lizzy Schmitt can be reached at schm9587@stthomas.edu.
When I was living on campus and eating in the cafeteria regularly I always wished that they had the nutritional information on the food. I have type 1 diabetes and it’s often difficult to guess how many carbohydrates are in the foods in the cafeteria/The Grill/Scooters. It is hard to guess nutritional information in food and having more exact numbers would have helped my blood sugar levels on many occasions.
Having the nutritional information probably will benefit a lot more people than what first comes to mind. Do I think its worth the money? I don’t know, but if it happened I wouldn’t complain.
I think this article is WAY off-base. While you can get a general idea of how healthy a food is just by looking at it (aka a piece of pizza vs. an apple), you can’t just go online and google a specific food (like “sweet and sour chicken” for example), and expect to get any nutritional information that is even close to correct. There is way too much you don’t know such as how it’s being cooked, what ingredients are used, etc. A cheeseburger could easily have anywhere from 200-4000+ calories. If all UST used was pre made frozen food, finding the nutritional information would be a piece of cake (look on the box), but at most of the dining locations a lot of the food is prepared on location. Google doesn’t know what ingredients the caf is using to make pizza. The only way to get accurate nutritional information is to do what they are proposing to do. Now whether or not anybody cares about that information can indeed be debated, but otherwise this article is way off base.
I agree with Dan. “If you put your napkin on your food and it soaks something up, you should probably put it back,” she said. What kind of quotation is this….is this the evidence being used to support her claim???? I expect more out of TM.
You can’t judge a food’s content by seeing how much grease is on it. It is very important to distinquish between unsaturated, saturated, and trans fats. This is only possible with nutrition facts. You can’t just google cheeseburger nutrition and believe that those facts apply to every cheeseburger in the world. I fully support being able to see nutrition facts, or at least an ingredient list.
Even if you could find the exact nutritional information online, anyone who knows the first thing about psychology will tell you the benefit of making nutritional information salient and readily available. The vast majority of college students aren’t going to spend the time to look it up and comparison shop different foods. At best, they’ll rely on half-baked heuristics and questionable shortcuts like the napkin test in their decision-making. Put the nutrition facts right in front of people, and at least some will think twice about that bacon cheeseburger. Furthermore, having more precise figures allows students to take a more mindful approach to eating, which is a valuable counter to the mindless consumption that characterizes our overweight society.