Boston – If there are college kids at your Thanksgiving table, don’t encourage them to gobble so much. Research suggests that the typical student leaves the holiday weekend as stuffed as the turkey, gaining more than a pound during the short break.
Students who started out overweight or obese tended to waddle back to campus with even more weight – more than 2 additional pounds on average, the study found.
A pound may not seem like much, but “when put in the context of such a short time frame … (the gain) is rather disturbing with potential long-term consequences,” says a report presented at the recent annual meeting of the Obesity Society in Boston.
No one has specifically studied what happens over the holidays to college students, who have the added baggage of pent-up demand for home cooking and pressure to please the doting relatives who dish it out.
Nutrition scientist Holly Hull and colleagues at the University of Oklahoma weighed 94 students the week before Thanksgiving and within a week of their return to classes – a span of roughly 12 days.
Students gained an average of 1.1 pounds. That’s an extra 320 daily calories, ” a slice of pumpkin pie per day,” she said.
No one is suggesting you skip the pie.
“It only comes around once a year, and the last thing a person wants to do is start a diet on the holidays,” said Brian Wansink, head of Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab.
However, “you want to go with a normal appetite” to Thanksgiving dinner, without having filled up on snack mix or appetizers beforehand, he suggested. That way you will have room for reasonable portions of each relative’s contribution to the meal without hurting someone’s feelings.
“If it gets to dessert and you don’t have a piece of pie, you’re going to be the family stinker,” warned Wansink.
He also suggests “banking” calories by being especially virtuous the week or so before a holiday.
It’s too late to do this for this Thanksgiving, but not for Christmastime.
