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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 24, 1987)
10 with a meal containing iron: You can drink it an hour before or an hour after, just not during the meal. “The best thing that you can do is drink orange juice with your iron meal. The orange juice will not only give you your RDA for vitamin C, but will also make the iron in the meat almost 200 percent more available. ” For calcium, Lupton says that two glasses of milk a day will fill the requirement. Now if I know girls, and I do believe I do, then I know that the “C” word just popped into most of their heads... you know, CALORIE!!!!!! Again, Lupton puts us at ease. She assures us a glass of whole milk and a glass of skim milk have equally as much calcium, just vastly different amounts of fat. She says those few calories are worth the few extra exercises you might have to perform, if you look at it in the long run. “Osteoporosis, ” she warns. “When you don’t get enough calcium, your body takes it out of your bones. You won’t see it for a while. But, when you get up in your forties and fifties, that’s when you start seeing osteoporosis. And it’s all because people haven’t started taking in enough calcium at a young age. ” Osteoporosis is absorption of bone so that the tissue becomes unusually porous and fragile. One other myth: Osteoporosis only occurs in women. “Men can get it, too,” Lupton explains. “The reason it is so much more prevalent in women is that women have a much smaller bone mass to begin with. It just takes longer for a male to develop the disease. “Also, there are some protective hormones in both men and women that keep calcium in the bones. But, as soon as women go through menopause, they lose those protective hormones.” Now let’shit on a couple more topics that cause confusion to the health conscious public: frozen foods and alcohol. Lupton actually favors frozen foods over fresh. “The way frozen foods are done now, the technology is such that they are very good. In fact, I think that sometimes the frozen foods are better than the fresh that have been sitting around for a few days. “They get frozen foods right at the peak and they freeze them right then. If you don’t overcook them, I don’t see anything wrong at all with the vegetables and dinners that are frozen. ” Lupton also sees nothing wrong with alcohol, in moderation. “I had one student who was trying to convince her boyfriend that he should stop drinking beer. So she decided she would do her diet record on him. She found that most of his B vitamins were coming from his beer! It was actually good for him!” Well, that’s women for you. Maybe Woody’s wrong. Maybe mom was right. Do you like the food on campus? by Staci Finch It’s a fact of life. Some people try to deny it, but no matter what, it’s there. People have to eat. Some sit down at tables, some eat on the run and some eat at the oddest hours possible, but everyone eats. Deciding where and what to eat can pose problems for all of us. It has been the downfall of many dates, especially if your date picks his favorite raw oyster bar and you can’t stand the things. But during the week, most of us choose those five-star restaurants close by, the campus cafeterias. First, we need to make a basic assumption. Students pay a lot of money to go to college. Therefore it follows that students don’t have a lot of cash lying around. So it would stand to reason that Texas A&M, being the understanding university that it is, would do it’s best to provide low-cost, tasty food for it’s students, right? Well, how are they going to do that? A&M Food Services has two ways for students to eat. One way is through the meal plan. Under this plan, students are allotted a certain number of meals per week, depending on which board plan they choose. Meals are served at certain times a day, and if you miss the times, you just have to wait till the next meal. And if you miss a meal, you lose the money. These plans are used at Sbisa, the Memorial Student Center cafeteria and the Commons dining hall. Many students see problems with the board plan. Jason Brown, a freshman aerospace engineering major, said while the board plan is economical, he doesn’t like only having a few places to eat. “Sbisa is closest for me, and it is the only place to go where I don’t spend all my money,” he said. “But I have to go when it’s so crowded and the food starts looking all the same. I would rather be on the point plan.” Ah, the point plan. The credit account to beat all credit accounts. While you can’t buy clothes with it, you can buy food anywhere on campus, including the Rudder Tower dining room. You can even buy bags of chips and 6-packs of cokes in the Underground grocery store with it. Just go to the food services office, plunk down a couple of hundred dollars and you’re set. Lonni Horowitz, a senior biology major, said she preferred the point plan over the board plan. “With the board plan, you can only eat at a limited number of places,” she said. “You can’t eat with your friends who don’t have a board plan and you can only eat at certain times, which can be inconvenient. “But with the point plan, you can eat anywhere on campus you want. I’m not always near a board plan place, and I like being able to stop in a snack bar and get a coke without always carrying change with me.” But no matter what plan you use, you still have to eat the food on campus. Therein lies the problem for many students. Laura Barnett, a freshman general studies major, said she was disillusioned about the food on campus. “When I first got here, I thought the food system was great,” she said. “I liked the variety I saw. But the more I am here, the food starts to blend together. I feel like I look at the same greasy lasagna and ravioli every day.” Brad Hays, a junior animal science major, said he thinks the food system is deceptive. “They just serve the same thing over and over,” he said. “A lot of times they just put sauce or cheese over the food and try to tell you it is something different. But it’s not. They can do better. ” While some students think the quality of the food is a problem, other students have problems with the price. “The big cafeterias on campus are too expensive,” Horowitz said. “It’s a lot easier to get food in the snack bars, and the food is the same, but it’s less expensive.” Some students said the price of the food was too high no matter where you eat. “The food is way overpriced on campus,” Katie Jankowski, a senior computer science major, said. “I went with a friend to the MSC the other day and our total was nearly $10. That is ridiculous because the food wasn’t that good. “You’re just paying for convenience when you eat on campus,” she continued. “Students don’t have a lot of money, and they shouldn’t have to pay for convenience, just for the food.”