Healthy Eating is the New Studying

As a student, studying is my whole life. I have a Youtube playlist dedicated to all the studying tips-and-tricks and study-with-me videos I have found over the past years. Anything that helps me cram a little bit more information - whether that be taping laminated papers with AP Biology material or carrying around a flashcard - is useful to me. So, when I stumbled across two studies titled The influence of eating habits on academic performance university students and Healthy eating habits and a prudent dietary pattern improve Nanjing international students' health-related quality of life, I had to read them.

The first article, by Reuter et al., sets out to discover a possible correlation between eating habits of university students and academics. Results showed that although the given foods (milk, vegetables, green salad, and fresh fruit) showed no change in GPA, eating breakfast showed a positive effect on GPA while fast food consumption had a negative effect.

The second article, by Walker et al., provides more evidence for the first article's conclusions. Skipping breakfast decreases vitality (having a lot of energy), wellbeing (healthy in all parts of life - mental, social, physical, psychological), digestive comfort, and disease prevention. Additionally, aesthetics and physical appearance improves with the consumption of healthy diets (somehow my trust in healthy foods was solidified when I read this statement...). In contrast to the benefits of healthy diets, a Westernized diet (processed foods, fried foods, red meat, high sugar foods) leads to discomfort digesting food. Not only does diet matter, eating patterns affect health greatly. Frequent snacking leads to decrease in wellbeing, digestive comfort, physical appearance, and disease prevention.

In summary, skipping breakfast (and other meals) have the most negative impact on both health, appearance, and grades (mental wellbeing). Diets and and eating patterns also have great impacts on the body's ability to digest food.