E110 SCARY STORIES
why the "Freshman 15" is inevitable
College kids are forgetting what healthy food tastes like
Angelica Catsichtis
In the United States, food and the way it is produced is a large part of everyday life and culture. It all started with Native Americans who soon become agriculturally advanced and able to farm and hunt for their food. After Christopher Columbus came to the United States and colonized, new types of food were introduced and new cultures around the consumption and creation were invented. The Native Americans showed the colonists farming techniques and introduced them to foods that would be successful in these new lands. Simple food ingredients such as corn and wheat are seen as the first steps in the long process of the United States’ food production. These foods have become a staple of the
American diet but are now processed and made into are now processed and made into ingredients. They are nolonger in their raw form and the food industry has turned them into foods that are unrecognizable. This one example of corn, has set the tone for the entirefood industry. Something as simple as a nutrition rich vegetable is now being turned into byproducts like corn syrup, vegetable oil and corn starch (Cooper). All products in extensive amounts are the main cause for disease like diabetes and cancer. These byproducts are allowed by the FDA in our everyday foods as substitutes for sugar when we have plenty of sugar to go around.
The FDA has many jobs in regulating the food and drugs that get distributed to the United States but does a bad job in what they allow pass to the people. Food items that are unhealthy are often passed after they are tested for two or three weeks because the test subjects appear to be healthy. Most foods will not do damage in such a short amount of time and are then passed on to the public and are deemed safe because they have the FDA’s approval. Companies try to find the cheapest and most affordable ways to genetically change food to fit their company’s and product’s needs. In doing this they often strip a food of its nutritional value and create a much worse food to serve as a substitute for the original. These by products can be created out of anything and very rarely they may have beneficial properties. More commonly, by products are called additives and are FDA approved with “no bad health effects, unless eaten in a large quantity.” Many people look at that and justify eating it by telling themselves that they are only eating a small amount. Anything that will be harmful in the long run in a large quantity should be equally as harmful in a small amount. Eventually “the bad” in the product will add up and the human body will have no ability to counteract it.
Lately there has been an increase in providing healthier eating and living. In doing that families decide to go to markets such as Trader Joes and whole foods and pick up any items they think “look healthy”. How many times have you walked up to fridge in Trader Joe’s with the newest “all natural” item and happen to gaze across the back to see a label with 0 grams of sugar and after drinking it you taste that it is extremely sweet? Is it truly sugar free or does it just mean they added other things much worse than sugar to create the same effect? People then face problem with items that say sugar free and zero calories and are very sweet but in reality they are artificially sweetened. That may not seem so bad when you are looking to diet your way into a size two bikini, but when you realize that they are more harmful than actual sugar I hope you start to think twice. The FDA has a term in which they use to identify items they have no proven results to back, GRAS, meaning “generally recognized as safe” (FDA). Does anyone really want to ingest something that scientists maybe think are okay? Then, why not just eat the sugar that is not as unhealthy and has known health risks that can be avoided if you keep track of sugar intake.
“Nothing says healthy like a mound of saturated fats scooped into a perfectly round ball atop a crunchy sugar cone!”
Food companies and their advertising teams have made Ice Cream a very quick and easy sweet tooth fix. Eating ice cream has become a major part of young children’s lives as they grow up in the United States. As a kid I perfectly remember begging my parents to take me to Carvel, the local ice cream store. Yet most of the time, they refused and I would sneak downstairs to a freezer I could barely reach to grab a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Phish Food. But then again what little kid didn’t? Ice cream became popular in the mid 1800’s when Lewis Dubois Bassett opened the first store front and from there on, hundreds of other companies opened their own. Today some of the most famous ice cream companies include Haagen-Dazs, Ben & Jerry’s, Breyers and Baskin Robbins. All companies now have over 20 different flavors and different processes in making their ice cream. The United States now produces about 1.6 billion gallons a year for consumption (The Evolution of Ice Cream). This means, with the current U.S. Population of 321,368,864 people, each person consumes about 4.98 gallons a year or 40 pints of ice cream. That’s 40 containers of your personal favorite ice cream that each have an average of 96 grams of sugar. Multiplied by 40, that’s an easy 3,840 grams people eat every year just in ice cream. Back in the 1850’s ice cream was made much differently than today with a different process and ingredients. Two hundred years ago ice cream was made simply with milk, sugar, eggs, extract and heavy cream. Now, they are made with those same basic 5 ingredients plus preservatives, flavor additives, genetically modified sugars and FDA approved chemical compounds. Companies state the reason for these added ingredients are to either keep the ice cream longer or to enhance the flavor of the ice cream but do not disclose that they may actually be harmful for human consumption (Corleone).
In the food industry there are both very large and very small dessert corporations, both with different goals. Some of the larger corporations such as Nestle and PepsiCo have been around since the 1850’s and rake in between 50 and 100 billion a year (Food for thought). That practically unlimited amount of money gives them the ability to create new products and make products extremely inexpensive to produce. On the other side, smaller businesses like mom and pop stores are using all natural food ingredients and healthy options but cost practically 10 times the amount to produce. A business that comes to mind and is close to home is our own University of Delaware, UDairy Company. The immense, cow spotted UDairy truck never drives around campus unnoticed. In the hot months it is always seen stopped on the green with a line of impatient, college students trying to get in their quick refreshing fix before class. Nothing says healthy like a mound of saturated fats scooped into a perfectly round ball atop a crunchy sugar cone. But do any of the people stop to read the back of the label? Of course not. If they took the two seconds it truly takes to turn the carton over they’d see the large amounts of saturated fats and sugar but they never do. Unless you catch a nutrition major who really knows their information and can explain what it means, students will always accept the free ice cream. In college, free is great.
"How many times have you walked up to fridge in Trader Joe’s with the newest “all natural” item and happen to gaze across the back to see a label with 0 grams of sugar and after drinking it you taste that it is extremely sweet?"
UDairy, on their website states that they encourage both learning and experiencing in the work place because they are a student run business. They say, “Founded on science, sustainability and entrepreneurship, the Creamery encourages discovery learning, with University students involved in every aspect of making and selling ice cream ‘from the cow to the cone.’” (UDel Creamery). Yet when contacted they will not let anyone take a tour of the facilities, claiming it is unsafe to the cows, the facilities and the tour group. With not much else as explanation, you wonder: If they pride themselves on being for the students, why not at least let them see where their ice cream is coming from.
College students tend to neglect the information they are given on the items they consume. All of our dining halls at The University of Delaware post the nutritional facts for their foods of the day on both their website and in the dining halls. I have yet to see a student get up and walk to the touch screen computer on the wall to browse the nutrition facts for the four slices of pizza they are scarfing down. It doesn’t faze them that there is more fat and saturated fat in one slice of pizza than they should be eating a week, because they don’t bother to look. They assume that “The Fresh Food Company” will provide them healthy options for every meal that they produce. And they may be right, if students understood that the portions they give when they serve the food are the portions you should actually be eating. Going up 8 times for a plate of pasta when they clearly gave you a cup’s worth the first time, isn’t exactly healthy eating. There also seems to be the opposite issue. Students assume that because we are told to eat salad, that it is healthy. In most cases that is the truth but there comes a point in making your salad when you realize that half of the things put on the salad are not healthy either. People often load their salad with unhealthy options like bacon, cheese, croutons and way too much dressing which covers any nutritional value the greens ever had. Where is the happy medium? No one knows until they try healthy eating and I’m positive if they did they wouldn’t regret it.
The over consumption of sugary and fatty foods is a problem in society yet no one seems to understand it. Yet the problem isn’t just that. It is that we never really know which food or drink has fake sugar because we haven’t been schooled in all of the ways the food industry is lying to us. Students have the means to understand the issue with the foods they are eating but don’t care to look or put their thoughts into practice. You don’t think you’re harming yourself but in reality you’re doing damage you never imagined. Sure, your mother told you “no more sugar” when you were little and you didn’t know why but of course you listened, because your mother always knows best. But have we really gotten any better with knowing why we shouldn’t eat it, or do we eat whatever looks appetizing?