It's the open block on a Monday, and it seems every student on campus is eating at the same dining hall. It's as if the students there need forever to decide whether they want a sandwich or a salad, ranch dressing or red wine vinaigrette, chicken or tofu. With a new, student-run online initiative, Tufts Dining Services hopes to render making healthy eating decisions like these much easier.
Officially titled the Dining Services Nutritive Analysis Program, the program was jump-started this year by senior Arielle Carpenter. It provides a list of ingredients and calculates the nutritional information for the food offered at Tufts' dining halls. Though for now the program works only for food at Dewick-MacPhie Dining Hall, Carpenter expects the program to be launched at Carmichael Dining Hall within the next week. She hopes to expand the program to all eateries on campus, including Hodgdon Good-to-Go, the Commons and Hotung Café.
Tufts' Nutrition Marketing Specialist Julie Lampie, Dining Services' dietician, expects the program to be up and running at Hodgdon by the time students return in January, and at Hotung and the Commons by the end of the spring semester.
The interactive online program is intended to provide a "big picture of the whole meal," Carpenter said. Students first input the amount of each food eaten from the dining halls for the program to tally. The program then displays a table of the food eaten, the portions consumed, and the nutritional breakdown. Unlike reading each individual nutrition card, the program will give a sum total of the calories and the grams of protein. To interpret these numbers, there are also "supplemental materials available [online], such as [a list of] recommended daily servings and a BMI calculator," according to Carpenter.
The program can be used before or after dining. Used after, students can calculate the foods they ate, and see retroactively their accumulation of nutrients. Before dining, one can use it to plan ahead.
"If you think about knowing what you're going to eat, you hold back on taking everything you see," Carpenter said.
Another purpose of the program, according to Carpenter, is for students to spend less time reading the information cards while getting food, and instead use the program at their convenience. "Students can do this at their leisure at their own computers if they have the time and if they're really interested," Lampie said.
"It's even more important from the safety perspective," she said. "There are many students with food allergies, and some are even life-threatening." The Nutritive Analysis Program has a feature that filters common allergens, weeding out foods with ingredients like milk, wheat, tree nuts, shellfish, and eggs.
"I really do think that this program is useful, since it eliminates a good deal of the worrying I go through when figuring what I'm going to eat each day," said freshman Jacob Passy, who has severe allergies to milk, eggs, peanuts and tree nuts that can cause anaphylaxis, a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction.
"It'll cut down on the time I spend in Dewick reading each menu card to see if I can eat the foods," he added.
The Nutritive Analysis Program began as part of Carpenter's community health internship with Tufts Dining Services.
"I'd been talking to Julie Lampie, and Dining Services had been wanting to do [a program like this] for several years," Carpenter said. Over the summer the office had set up a software system called FoodPro, which helps with all aspects of the food service business. In September, Carpenter began working on the program, manually typing in and updating the nutritional information, ingredients, and allergens for food offered in the dining halls.
"The program's been available to us for a number of years," Lampie said, "but in order to provide it to students plenty of work has to be completed before making it available, like having every ingredient and every nutrition analysis for every inventory item that we offer, which is hundreds of products."
Carpenter led demonstrations in both Dewick and the "Introduction to Community Health" class, informing pilot groups how the Nutritive Analysis Program works. She asked students to fill out surveys at both demos and said she has gotten great feedback from students.
"I'd never heard about the program, but I discovered it when I was looking at the dinner menu for Dewick," freshman Blair Read said. "Healthy eating is important to me ... and I'll definitely keep using the program, [since the Nutritive Analysis Program] helps me monitor how healthy my meals are on a daily basis."
Senior Katherine Rosen said that as a healthy eater, she was enthusiastic about the program. "I'm the kind of person that likes to know the nutrition content of the food I'm eating, because a lot of the times I think I'm surprised about what I don't know."
Carpenter emphasized, however, that the program is not intended to encourage calorie counting. Rather, she said, it aims to "give people options and get a better sense of what they're eating and understand more about health and nutrition."
One downside to the program is the difficulty of figuring out exactly what number to put in for quantity, Read said. "[I don't know] how many portions I'm eating with dinner because of the bullet style," she said. A few things are also excluded from the foods listed in the menu, like condiments, salad dressings and ice cream. According to Carpenter, they have not yet been activated but will be in a couple weeks.
Passy said that while the program has been mostly successful, there are still a few kinks. "For example, it lists fried foods as being safe for me, but due to cross-contamination with other foods being cooked in the same oil, I can't eat fried foods," he said.
Similar programs have also been implemented at several schools in around the area, such as Mount Holyoke College, but Tufts currently has no feedback from the success of those programs.
Carpenter sees the Tufts program as a success. "I think people will definitely use it again," she said.
