Surviving in dormitory with healthy meals

By Park Seung-chan

Most students spend their school life living at home with their families until high school. After that, most of them live in university dormitories.

While living there, one of the most common anxieties is meals. Most students and their parents have experienced concerns about eating while students live apart from their families.

While parents care about their children’s healthy meals and snacks at home, restaurants near universities often contain artificial seasonings and poor quality ingredients because many students look for cheap but tasty food.

Students can also be negligent about their meals. I collected some health tips which are helpful for getting enough nutrition and staying healthy while living in a dormitory, based on my experience.

The first tip is eat enough fruit. Fruit contains plenty of nutrients as well as vitamins and fiber. Vitamins B and C are helpful for reducing stress and recovering from fatigue.

If you have a refrigerator in the dormitory, you can keep fruit there. You'd need some zipper bags for keeping the fruit fresh. Without a refrigerator, keeping fruit from spoiling is difficult. In this case, you can buy fruit juice or tropical fruits.

These days, natural fruit juice is available without added sugar. Most of these items are packed in a pouch, so they can be stored at room temperature. Most tropical fruits do not spoil easily at room temperature, so they will also be good alternatives to keep in the dormitory.

The second tip is about drinking. Nowadays, it is hard for university students to avoid drinking. But alcohol causes both direct and indirect problems.

As for direct problems, alcohol disturbs the absorption of nutrients. Furthermore, alcohol induces dehydration because the processes that decompose alcohol consume water as the catalyst. As for indirect problems, we may skip two or three meals after drinking due to excess stomach acid and hangovers and that are associated with malnutrition.

For these reasons, avoiding drinking is the best way to remain healthy but you need effective preparations in case you have to participate in the inevitable. The first measure is choosing bland and less fatty foods like fish or chicken salad. Eating something before drinking is also effective because it protects your stomach from excessive gastric acid. It is also recommended you drink enough water before drinking alcohol and before going to sleep.

The third tip is avoiding instant foods. There are lots of instant foods at convenience stores like cup noodles, three-minute curry rice, and hamburgers. The critical problem with these foods is in their ingredients and containers.

Most instant foods contain cheap ingredients like stale or genetically modified ingredients. Consequently, they contain a lot of salt and fat without protein and vitamins while lacking in minerals.

The containers emit chemical materials like environmental hormones when it heated. They can cause bad symptoms because these are accrued in the body for several years. The best way to prevent these problems is to avoid instant foods. When you eat them, it’s better to eat instant food with a side dish like kimchi or chicken breasts to create balance in the meal.

Also, move the contents to a safe container before cooking them. Additionally, dumping the water used to boil noodles and making soup with fresh water is a good way to remove fried noodle’s oil. For similar reasons, eating canned food after washing it is effective for removing pigments and bad oil.

Now you know the way to keep healthy when eating at school. Saving on eating time and reducing living expenses are good but whatever you are doing, studying or engaging in sports, you need to manage your health for higher efficiency.

Based on these tips, you will be able to take care of your health and approach your goal one step earlier in finishing your dormitory life successfully.

The writer is a student at KAIST. He can be reached at seungchanpark@kaist.ac.kr.