OPINION: What you fuel your body with is important

Kyran Crist, Arts and Entertainment Editor|October 31, 2021

The_Sea_of_Japan_at_Kanai

Matt Cooper

The Sea of Japan is served on a bed of green lettuce and centered with a cucumber filled with Kanai’s in-house made crab salad. The Sea of Japan has a varying list price of about $30.

There’s a stereotype about college students and our eating habits, the ol’ “living off ramen and coffee/energy drinks.” Which may not be exact, but it is pretty close to how well we pay attention to our nutrition.

We spend all day bouncing from class to class and then knock out either a nap or a bit of homework before we have to go to work or other obligations — we need fast and easy. Fast and easy these days comes up to about a bunch of empty carbs and lots of sugar.

Our dining options here on campus are wide in variety and offer a lot of options when it comes to healthy eating. But usually those aren’t the tastiest things on the menu, and I don’t know about you but I don’t want to spend 10 dollars on a gross meal.

Yes, there is always the salad machine, it looks like it would have fresh salad mixings in it that are not soggy at all (note the sarcasm).

Bottom line, unless you are making your own food or picking the healthiest thing on the menu in Shocker Hall  — it is hard to find a meal with the proper nutrients that your body needs.

That being said, we are in one of the most non-stop and fast paced times of our lives. We will always have time to eat better later, right?

Short answer — yeah. Long answer — no.

Our health is something that should be just as prioritized as our classes and work. We can’t go days on end skipping meals and snacking on whatever throughout the day and substituting fake energy for the stuff we need.

I’m not saying you have to change your whole diet. Just little changes, healthy food isn’t fast but it is if you spend some time on Sunday night to meal prep for your week.

The best thing you can do for yourself in college is to take care of yourself so that you’re better off, that’s why we’re here right? To gain knowledge and experience to be better off in life.

Simple meals that you like and pack easily are great to take on campus, there is a microwave in the RSC if you need an area to heat it up, and there are areas to just relax and eat. It’s cheaper, it’s better for your body and it saves time trying to figure out what to eat.

At the end of the day the saying is true, our bodies are machines and we need to fuel them properly or they just won’t work.