Living Well: Purdue feeds its students healthy food facts

This fall, Purdue University launched its NetNutrition Web site to help students who eat in dining halls. Those young diners can log on and track the nutritional value of the meals they eat in cafeterias on campus. If a student selected, say, a plate of waffles or a turkey sandwich with coleslaw for lunch, he could key in those meals to discover the amount of calories, fat, carbohydrates, cholesterol and protein consumed.

The idea is to create more awareness for healthy eating and personalize the knowledge to individual students. So far, so good.

"We received 32,000 hits on the site during the second half of September," reported Kathy Manwaring, the school's assistant director of dining services. "We got another 15,000 hits in October, which we feel shows strong interest."

Manwaring said some students are using the service to preplan meals, while others use it as an online food diary. Because Purdue's dining halls offer wireless Internet connection, she has even observed students accessing NetNutrition at their cafeteria tables.

"The whole thing started about 2 1/2 years ago," Manwaring said. "It has been a group effort to create healthy eating options and habits. Dining services has been one part of it, but students and our marketing department have also participated."

Insightful point here: More students are calling for healthier foods and university marketing executives know that fresh, whole foods are a selling point for high school seniors and their parents. Same goes for dining hall supervisors, who are in the business of giving customers what they want.

"There's no question that students today want everything fresh, whether it's at the stir-fry bar or make-your-own-pizza station," Manwaring said. "We have fresh fruit bars that do extremely well."

The NetNutrition site allows students to estimate the caloric and nutritional intake of deli sandwiches, salad and fruit bars, Mongolian stir-fry stations, breakfast foods and beverages. A full-time staffer and part-timer are working on adding the nutritional skinny on Purdue main course recipes.

"We're still working on casseroles and entrees," Manwaring said. "All of the ingredients need to be verified and coded to USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) databases. It's a lot of work, but we are getting there and hope to be adding those recipes soon."

Purdue and other schools already are finding accessible ways for students to identify the healthful foods on menus. At Purdue's dining hall, signs are posted at food stations to indicate serving sizes. For instance, when you order fries you might see an illustration that says one serving of fries equals the dimensions of a regular bar of soap.

Here in Seattle, some students have access to a school cafeteria that arguably provides the most healthful and delicious food of any in the land. That would be in Kenmore at Bastyr University. The cafeteria is open to the public on its campus in St. Edward State Park.

To their credit, Bastyr dining staffers long ago began labeling all entrees by individual ingredients -- for both health information and an informal way to educate diners about why these vegetarian and vegan items all taste so great.