Freshman 15

As a freshman you continually hear everyone talking about the “freshman fifteen”. What really is this “freshman fifteen”?Does every freshman get it? The freshman fifteen is considered to be a weight gain of fifteen pounds that students pack on during their freshman year of college. Studies show that students on average gain 3 to 10 pounds during their first two years of college. This weight gain usually occurs during the first semester of freshman year. Being that you are away from home and not eating homemade meals. This is the main reason people tend to gain weight. Since everyone heard warnings about the "freshman 15”, is there any way to avoid it?

Homemade meals are healthier, because they are usually made from scratch. Being that these meals are made from scratch they do not consist of high amounts of preservatives. When you replace a homemade meal with a three minute meal there is where the problem arises. Let’s face it, foods such as mac and cheese, Ramen noddle soups, and frozen foods do not only taste good but they are also easy to make and usually inexpensive. This is a primary reason in which college students eat these foods often. In fact college is very expensive, so this is a way to save money.

Have you ever stepped back and asked yourself what are these foods made up of? Any edible product is supposed to have a nutrition facts table placed on it, by law. During an interview with a former freshman at Buffalo State College, Jessica Sanchez, she stated that “I don’t even know what sodium means.” For dinner Jessica enjoyed one of “students favorite” Ramen noddle soups. Many students, such like Jessica, do not even know how to read these nutritional facts charts and do not even bother reading them most of the time.

If we wants to know how much calories, sugar, and sodium content we are indulging, we should  learn how to read the outside package of the very foods we eat. Let’s say you decided to eat the chicken flavor soup, when you read the nutrition facts it states that it contains 770 mg of sodium. Once you read that the product has such a high amount of sodium this should make you contemplate if you should be consuming this product. When you read the serving size of the soup and it states that the listed information is only for“1/2 block” meaning now you have to double every number you see. Your seven hundred 700 mg of sodium now transforms into 1400 mg of salt in just one meal. Once Jessica learned more about the nutrition facts she in took for dinner she stated “That’s outrage!” Let’s face it, us as college students need to enlighten ourselves more about nutrition and healthy life choices.

Signed, Senator Jennifer Rodriguez