Going to college your freshman year is an entirely new experience, especially when it comes to food. Everyone’s heard of the freshman fifteen caused by the horrendous eating habits of today’s young adults. Myself is no exception. I’d frequently make trips to the Target down the street with my friends and grab a pack of double stuff Oreos and Red Bull, the staple foods in my diet freshman year. But alas this bliss of eating whatever I wanted ended and I came crashing back to reality when I stepped on a scale over Christmas break. Holy mackerel. You may be one of the few lucky people who have a fast metabolism and can eat whatever they want, when they want. As for me, not the case.

So the next semester I started becoming more conscientious with my food and drink. I started eating healthier, picking salads at lunch, not choosing pizza and mac n cheese every single day for dinner. But there was something about my dining hall that stuck out to me and put a wrench in my plans. When I was a freshman I wasn’t even aware we had a water machine in the dining hall. All there were was soda machine, staring you straight in the face. Next to those were juice machines and some for different flavored milk. Then, if you get in really closely and squint your eyes you see a small sign that reads ‘push down for water.’ Water doesn’t even get its own nozzle. The significance of this is there are 2 water nozzle things, one attached to the soda machine, and one unlabelled by the juice. Did I mention that one of them barely works?

It doesn’t stop there. My college recently added a new drink machine in the dining hall filled with different Vitamin Water options. Vitamin Water is very deceiving in itself, which makes me not like the product. While it is advertised as a healthy alternative to soda, it is pretty shocking to see the actual ingredients.

With 125 calories in a bottle and over 26 grams of sugar it is about the same as drinking a can of soda which has 140 calories and 39 grams of sugar. Vitamin Water also contains, you guessed it, vitamins! While this may seem like a good thing it surprisingly doesn’t matter. An article by Adda Bjarnadottir showed that most of the vitamins the water provides for you, you already get enough of. The extra vitamins consumed are disposed by the body through the urinary system. Dining halls also don’t have bottles, they have nozzles which students can keep going back to for a refill until their heart's content. This problem affects everyone, even if you don’t show the weight gain caused by artificial sugar. These sugars can lead to multiple health problems that can be life threatening including heart disease and diabetes. Artificial sugars and vitamins are not the way to go when it comes to being healthy and frankly I believe it’s time college campuses realized this. While many healthy food options have been introduced the soft drink problem is getting out of hand. Colleges should start realizing that the true drinking problem on college campuses comes from with their own dining halls.