Health is major concern all people on the planet share. A healthy lifestyle not only is beneficial to the physical health of a person but its benefits can be seen in different areas of their life. Improvements to health can have reciprocal benefits. This means fixing a faulty health system will have a positive impact on their overall well-being.

One of the biggest ways people can improve their health is by examining the food they eat. With that said young people, especially college students may have the best intentions regarding their health but don’t always execute accordingly. The best way to fix this is, change the system in which students (specifically ones here at University of Wisconsin-Madison) make nutritional choices daily. Naturally putting a target and trying to fix the system through the residence dining halls.

There are many problems to be solved regarding health in relation to students and their life in the residence halls. There will be a couple in which I intend to focus on: awareness of food consumption and easy access to information on ways to improve a healthy lifestyle.

I intend to attack the problem from different angles, hoping that will result in a further reach. In my project I hope to propose a plan in which students can have direct access to their food consumption and its specific nutritional information in relation to what they buy via their WisCard. This makes it easy and not time intensive for students to go (probably through a computer program) to track the food they consume and the effects it has, be it positive or negative.

I also intend to provide students with direct access to tips on little things they can do to improve overall health and physical well-being. This will be small things, but hopefully they can make a large impact. This will be attempted through posters giving little tips on what a student can do to improve their health (i.e. Walk up the stairs instead of taking an elevator once a day). Improvements for healthy living will become captioned on the website with student food intake as well.

These are little things I hope to fix in the system (where students are not able to reach their potential health) which I hope will make a difference. It may not change the world. It won’t even change the behavior of most of the student body but if it makes a difference to a few then something will be accomplished.

2 responses to “

  1. I like your project idea! One thought I had was perhaps you could try to make a difference with what food is actually offered at the dining halls. For example, a lot of the food they sell has high fructose corn syrup or hydrogenated fat in it. So maybe you could consider communicating with the dining halls about what choices they offer to students and why, and if there are healthier alternatives that they could have instead.

  2. Awesome project, Mary Lee! I like the idea of combining food awareness with other small-steps health options, and creating a way for students to monitor it in an easy (and fun!) way. It would be cool if the website you’re talking about had a way of tracking other health changes students make. It might be possible to include codes on the posters you describe, which students could then enter into the site in a sort of game to see how “pro-health” they are (i.e., if you climb the stairs, you enter the code on the poster that encouraged you to do so). If the codes are something students could capture with their phone and send in, that would be even better. I’m not sure this is within the feasible scope of your project, but it might be something to consider. Resources to consider for background info include a search of the PsychInfo database through wisc.edu libraries for research on how tracking personal information guides decision making. Depending on how you want to set up the site, looking into “game dynamics” might also be helpful (this TED is a good place to start http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_top_of_the_world.html Good luck, this sounds great!

Leave a comment