My experience with residence food hasn’t been particularly good. I haven’t gained the fabled “Freshman 15,” but I have had problems with how the food makes me feel, especially when it comes to its salt content. I generally avoid eating excessively salty foods because when I do, I feel consistently queasy, bloated, and sluggish.
Though I don’t know how much salt is in the food that my mandatory meal plan provides for me, but from the taste and how it makes me feel, I’m starting to worry. Just how much sodium am I actually putting in my body, am I getting too much?
The Heart and Stroke Foundation reports that Canadians ingest between two and three times the recommended amount of sodium. The recommended daily salt intake is 1 tsp, or for people who already have hypertension, 2/3 tsp. It’s been suggested that unless you’re cooking your own food, and limiting the amount of salt added to it, you’re likely having too much. It would follow that food from the various dining halls around campus are not exempt from this rule of thumb.
Why should the sodium content of your food actually matter to you? Two words: Blood pressure. The danger in having too much salt on a daily basis is that it’s been directly linked to increases in blood pressure, which then increases your risk of suffering from heart problems and strokes. While blood pressure isn’t something most students worry about, developing a high blood pressure in your twenties is a seriously dangerous thing to do to your body. There could be long-term health problems if you’re young with hypertension and don’t make efforts to lowering and maintaining your blood pressure at a healthy level. By the time you reach your sixties, your blood pressure will be through the roof, and your risk for heart disease, stroke, and kidney problems will increase dramatically.
In spite of this anti-salt advisory, you shouldn’t go so far as to cut salt from your diet entirely. Having too little of it in your diet can cause health problems as well — although, according to UK scientists in the British Medical Journal, cutting down salt consumption “should be global priority.” What’s more, according to a study by scientists in the US, there could be between 54,000 and 99,000 fewer heart attacks each year if everyone ingested half a teaspoon less salt per day.
I’m not condemning dining hall food, or any other food that isn’t prepared by your own hand. Still, what I do want is to encourage everyone to be more conscious about the food they eat. Whether you’re just eating at your dining hall or going on a Tim Horton’s run, try to check the nutritional information, or make an informed decision on what’s the best thing for you to eat, your body will thank you.
Here’s what other students have to say about their dining hall experiences.
John Cockshutt, Victoria College, English Literature.
The food has greatly improved from last year, it’s much healthier. The Chef’s obviously working hard. I come from background of food services, so I understand the difficulty of providing good and healthy food to large numbers of people when you have limited resources. There are areas that need to be improved, like the salt intake for students. There should be more variants of vegetables, and better coffee. On the whole, given what they have and given the wide range of people they have to cater to, they’re doing a pretty good job.
Josh Oliver, Trinity College, Humanities.
Residence food isn’t as bad as many people say it is. There’s usually lots of vegetables and fruits, but it can be tricky to get enough protein; the meat is often very strange. They also serve rice too often.
Stephanie Galt, University College, Sociology.
The residence food is good in general, but can often become monotonous, especially if you don’t always like the main entrees and are choosing from the same options every day. The food also tends to be a little overpriced.
Meghan Ruel, Victoria College, Music.
The variety is there: up to five different stations of food at every meal. Fair representation of the four food groups: protein, whether it be chicken, beans or fish, salad bar, fruit baskets, soups and pastas. My first impression of the Burwash dinning hall was that it presented well-balanced meals. However, after only two weeks of dinning at Burwash, my blood pressure, heart rate, and water retention increased considerably. The puffy fingers and eyes could only mean one thing: sodium.To avoid white refined carbs, omega 6, and sodium, I favour the boiled vegetables, spinach and salad bar. However, as a music student with sometimes 12 hour long days, and daily interval workouts keeping me in shape, the calorie content in salads is not very filling nor satisfying. I am not constricting myself to certain foods, but am rather eating real food; food that has not been over-processed, fried or modified. One must be creative in making simple foods good: that oatmeal every morning? Make it tasty with some yogurt, a bit of maple syrup, or even use the “belgian waffle” toppings they have on the weekends to sweeten it up. Food should be simple, that is my view!
