Fast Food Firmly Entrenched In Students’ Lifestyle
Recent research backs up University of Leicester campaign to promote healthy eating amongst students
A survey of eating habits among first year self-catering students showed that university lifestyle tends to lead to an increased consumption of fast foods.
This was more noticeable amongst male students, who confessed to thinking of cooking as ‘women’s work’ and were more likely to eat fast food than their female counterparts, while female students were more likely to be influenced by worries about weight gain and appearance.
The study, carried out by student Hannah Cooper under the supervision of Dr Ellen Annandale at the University of Leicester Department of Sociology, also indicated that students’ fast food consumption increased when they left home and began to cater for themselves, in spite of the known link between fast food consumption and obesity.
Convenience, peer pressure and budget appear to be the main reasons for their eating habits, while the gender difference is widened by a male culture of greater alcohol consumption though males also played more sport.
Another factor in students’ choice of fast foods was quite simply that they liked it. Pizza proved to be favourite, followed by pasta, curry and French fries.
While the students studied felt that living among new people had not influenced their eating habits, nevertheless peer pressure played a major role in decisions about when and what to eat and whether or not to cook for themselves. Read more
Obesity Gene May Be Associated With Dementia
A gene linked to obesity may also be associated with dementia according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles generated 3D maps of over 200 healthy elderly people’s brains and found a pattern of diminished brain volume in people with specific DNA sequence within the fat mass and obesity-associated (FTO) gene.
‘We’ve known for some time that there’s a link between obesity in mid life and the development of Alzheimer’s disease. However this study suggests that healthy people who carry a specific DNA sequence associated with obesity could be at a greater risk of developing dementia. A reduction in people’s brain tissue was observed but this wasn’t linked to other obesity-related factors such as cholesterol levels, diabetes or high blood pressure. Read more