By: David Wojtkowski
NIAGARA UNIVERSITY, N.Y. – Clet Dining Hall, a dining option frequently visited by NU students, has displays that shows the day’s menu as well as some nutritional information of that food, but that information could be better at helping students reach their fitness goals, especially if one’s goal is to build muscle.
The current displays showcase four pieces of information: calories, total fat, sodium and carbs. This is all great information to have, if one knew what serving size it was referring to. Therefore, the information that is displayed is useless because it doesn’t define the portion size the numbers are describing.
While the sheets do include an item’s calorie count it does not make mention of how many calories are from fat which are empty calories. Empty calories are calories with no real nutritional value attached to them. They aren’t actually used by the body, so having that distinction made by Clet Dining Hall would be helpful for students to make better decisions.
An important piece of information not included on the nutrition sheets, is the protein content of an item. How many grams of protein a food has is very important for the building of muscle, as protein is what the body uses to repair ripped muscle tissue and make them stronger. By not making the protein content easily available, it’s hard for students to know what food items would be good to load up on to build muscle and it could cause students to eat more protein their body actually needs, as the body can only properly utilize about 30 grams of protein every three hours.
All in all, the nutritional sheets at Clet Dining Hall could be doing a better job at giving students the information they need to live a healthy lifestyle.
Niagara Wire 