Food Choice Quality among College Students

The American diet is typically thought of as one that consists of highly processed foods with minimal nutritional value. Without adequate time to become educated about how and why the American diet is having detrimental health consequences, the general population may not know the importance of finding an alternative diet or how to begin making changes. The aim of this work was to study the diets of college students and analyze the quality of their food choices. Data on food patterns were collected from volunteers at UW-Fox Valley using the 24-hour dietary recall method. Collected information was compared to published data from students at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain and analyzed in terms of the Mediterranean Diet Score. Using the Mediterranean Diet as a framework for a diet known to remediate metabolic syndrome, suggestions were formulated for how college student diets could be improved