Knowing Nutrition

When many adults think of campus dining hall food, they picture the greasy pizza, cheeseburgers and mystery meat that were staples in their college diets. But in the past few years, as America has woken up to its unsavory eating habits, college campus eateries have modified their menus to include healthier food that is tastier than the traditional fare. At Boston University, the creators of Sargent Choice - BU's line of healthy, wholesome foods - is challenging the stereotypical college student's diet and removing the stigma sometimes placed on dining hall foods.

ALL-ENCOMPASSING COOKIE

BU Nutrition and Fitness Center Assistant Director Alison Books, who helped develop the Sargent Choice program, said the program aims to reform healthy eating by modifying the recipes of foods people enjoy to include healthier ingredients.

"To make something healthy you want to start with something that everybody likes anyway because chances are the healthy version will be just as good, hopefully, if not better," Books said.

Before Sargent Choice began, the Nutrition and Fitness Center developed its "signature cookie," a cookie based on the Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie that the center made more nutritious by changing ingredients and proportions, Books said.

Although the cookie is not lower in calories than the original Tollhouse cookie, it is healthier because it is made from whole-wheat flour and oats, instead of all-purpose flour. The Nutrition and Fitness Center's recipe calls for peanut butter containing heart healthy fat instead of saturated fat, and oil is substituted for butter. The recipe also reduces the amount of sugar and uses mini chocolate chips, modifications that make the new recipe healthier than the original Tollhouse method, Books explained.

"So you end up with not a low calorie cookie but a really wholesome cookie that for every bite you are getting more nutrition, more of what the body needs and less of what it doesn't need," Books said. "We love using this cookie as an example because it encompasses all of the principles of what Sargent Choice became."

WHOLESOME, NOT LOW-CALORIE

The cookie is similar to all Sargent Choice foods because it is not a typical "diet food." Sargent Choice representatives take foods and add more nutritious ingredients to make them healthier, but do not focus solely on lowering the number of calories in a food.

"Basically our bodies need energy to run throughout the day, and being a college student, it wouldn't make sense for us to make all foods low calorie," Books said. "That's not what we need."

Stereotypical diet plates that contain vegetables and brown rice in very small portions do not have to be the only way to diet effectively, Books said.

"This is more about getting adequate nutrition, adequate energy, and for every bite, you are getting more flavor and more nutrition," she said. "It's just a really nice wholesome way to eat if you are looking to meet your needs throughout the course of the day."

Books used the example of sandwiches to explain how subtle changes can make foods healthier. Sandwiches should use whole-wheat bread, less meat, more vegetables and heart healthy oils to make them wholesome.

"We have certain criteria that everything has to fall under, but what you end up with is a wholesome sandwich that will fill you up. It is going to be tasty, and it is hopefully attractive because of all the beautiful colors," Books said. "It's something people are going to want to eat."

The Sargent Choice line also includes muffins that contain less sugar than regular muffins. The Sargent Choice muffins are also whole grain and are made with heart healthy oils, Books said in a follow-up email.

"So every bite of a Sargent Choice muffin will provide more of what the body needs and less of what it doesn't need. However, the only way to make a baked good or other food lower in calories is to replace an ingredient that has calories with one that does not (such as replacing sugar with a sugar substitute) or to eat a smaller amount of that food," Books said in the email. "The Sargent Choice muffins are smaller than a muffin found at Dunkin Donuts or Campus Convenience, so calorie-wise it's more reasonable to fit in a Sargent Choice muffin than a muffin from another location."

Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences nutrition professor Joan Salge-Blake stressed the importance of incorporating fat into the diet because it plays important roles in the human body.

"You want to make sure it is heart healthy vegetable oils," she said. "Even if you were trying to lose weight, you should not eliminate any food group. You want to make sure you are adding good combinations."

CHOICES AND CHANGES

Since the Sargent Choice program was instituted in all BU dining halls in spring 2006, the menu has expanded and aims to provide Sargent Choice aficionados with a variety of healthy dining options.

Breakfast options include oatmeal, fruit, "made to order" omelettes and whole-wheat muffins, bagels and English muffins, Foodservice Director Joseph Cacciatore said in an email. For lunch and dinner, students can select a deli sandwich, a Sargent Choice entrée or a healthy pasta station option.

Books said Sargent Choice soups include extra vegetables and whole grain fillers like brown rice. Sargent Choice soups never have heavy cream bases, which are high in fat. The soups also contain less sodium than normal soups.

"When you take down the sodium of something, you have to replace the flavor with something else. Otherwise it's just going to be a bland soup," Books said. "So we work with chefs . . . to create really nice flavors in the soups . . . so we use herbs, spices, roasting, grilling, all different kinds of methods."

Although most Sargent Choice foods include lean meats, such as chicken and turkey, Books said the program is expanding to include more red meats. Some of the newer options include meat chili, sausage pizzas, beef stew, pot roast and beef stir fry.

"Like the sausage, beef is higher in fat then the chicken breast, but we use an amount . . . that's a lot less than what you would normally think, but you won't be getting any less food because there will be more vegetables," Books said. "So your plate will be totally full, and you will still get bites of beef, and it will taste delicious."

Salge-Blake said little changes -- like eating whole grain muffins and pizza crust -- can help people become more health conscious.

"[The creators of Sargent Choice] have looked at many of the foods in the BU cafeteria and made nutrition delicious," Salge-Blake said. "They take these nutrition guidelines and serve them so that the students on campus can feel comfortable choosing Sargent Choice because it tastes fabulous and is healthy for them."

COLLABORATIVE EFFORT

Sargent Choice representatives partner with BU's Dining Services to share ideas, and both work together to create food recipes.

"It really is a nice collaboration between Sargent College and Dining Services because it couldn't exist without both of our entire input," Books said.

Cacciatore said the dining hall staff is enthusiastic about providing healthy food options for students. Books agreed that her relationship with dining hall employees is friendly.

"The fact that we are providing healthy options at different stations everyday that taste great has been a real added plus for the students' menu options," Cacciatore said. "From our staff's standpoint they are always excited to be able to present fresh and new options to the students."

Sargent holds training seminars, taught in a classroom style format, before each semester to help dining hall staff learn more about the recipe specifications for Sargent Choice.

"Both the college and the dining department develop training programs for both the management team and the hourly associates," Dining Services Operations Director Bruce Perry said in an email.

Although Sargent Choice aims to make desirable, tasty foods, it is required to make foods within nutritional guidelines determined by the Nutrition and Fitness Center and dining services.

"Sargent Choice has been modeled after the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005," Perry said. "Our menu selections offer delicious, nutritious, satisfying foods. The result is that the program has been received very well within the community."

When developing the Sargent choice menu for healthy eating, it is important to provide nutritional information to interested consumers, Cacciatore said.

"Once a recipe is developed, Sargent College will break it down so that [it] meets the nutritional criteria, then dining enters it into our own system so all the locations on campus have access to the information," he continued.

While Books said the recipes are just another recipe with little difference in preparation for staff, Cacciatore said the recipes are more precise because of the health specifications.

"With Sargent Choice recipes you have to follow them to a T in order for them to follow the nutritional guidelines," Cacciatore said. "When the program was first rolled out, all the managers went to a 'train the trainer' meeting where we set the guidelines and procedures for the program."

FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS TO HIGH HOPES

The program, which began as a few a la carte items on a cart wheeled through Sargent College during lunchtime, has expanded rapidly to provide options to all locations on campus.

Developed by the Nutrition and Fitness Center at Sargent College in 2005, Sargent Choice is a relatively new program at BU. The program piloted at Shelton dining hall and the Fresh Food Company -- the West Campus dining hall - in fall 2005. It then expanded and has been offered in all dining halls and retail locations since spring 2006, Books said in a follow-up email.

Last semester, program organizers decided to continue improving the variety of food offered by updating some of the recipes and increasing the recipe options. Recently, organizers have begun efforts to develop a Sargent Choice catering line and also to create a more extensive website, Books said.

The "work in progress" website will individualize the Sargent Choice program to each BU student.

"Somebody can go onto the website, create a profile, enter in their height, their weight, their age, their physical activity level, get a breakdown of their nutrition needs, calories, fats, proteins, vitamins and minerals and then also get food group breakdown grains, fruits and vegetables - the whole bit," Books said.