5 Eating Healthy
What Is It?
Eating healthy means including a variety of nutritious foods in your daily diet while consuming a healthy number of calories. This consists of not consuming too many calories or too few (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2022).
Why Is It Important?
Reuter and colleagues found a positive correlation between eating healthy, which includes regular breakfast consumption, and self-reported GPA. They also found greater fast food consumption to be correlated with a lower self-reported GPA (Reuter et al., 2021).
Wongprawmas et al. (2022) suggest that during time at college, several internal factors such as desire, taste, and perception as well as extrinsic factors such as context or culture may discourage students from following nutritional guidance.
Many students choose to eat processed foods due to their convenience and cost effectiveness. However, Berg (2022), an author for the American Medical Association, posits that these foods trade nutrition for convenience. Consuming processed foods on a regular basis can, increase risk of disease including cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, obesity and type 2 diabetes (Berg, 2022). Additionally, the stress experienced by students can lead to overeating.
Dakanalis et al. (2023) report that both emotional eating and stress-induced eating lead to the predisposition to eat in response to negative emotions. The preferred foods are mainly energy-dense but poor in nutrients. This type of eating pattern can lead to weight gain, high blood pressure, musculoskeletal issues, and type 2 diabetes.
Tools You Can Use
- Nutrition labels are a useful tool to evaluate the nutritional content of a food. Click on the plus signs in the label to learn more about how to evaluate nutrition content.
- The app is free to download
- App offers the ability to search or scan barcode to enter food information
3. Additional apps you can use
4. Harvard Nutrition Plate
Copyright © 2011, Harvard University. For more information about The Healthy Easting Plate, please see The Nutrition Source, Department of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, www.thenutritionsource.org, and Harvard Health Publications, www.health.harvard.edu