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College is the first time many students will experience living away from home and with learning how to manage college course loads, students also need to figure out how to feed themselves for the next four years. The focus of this thesis will be to assess the current food environment available at Arizona State University. The Perceived Food Environment (PFE) Model was used to evaluate the accessibility, affordability, acceptability, and adequacy of the residential dining halls, restaurants, and marketplaces.<br/><br/>The Tempe and Downtown Phoenix campuses’ food environments were used in this paper to determine what they offer and how healthy the food options are for students. Both campuses combined offer 32 possible choices for students to dine. The Tempe campus has 4 dining halls, 15 fast-casual restaurants, and 5 Provisions on Demand (P.O.D) Markets. The Downton campus has 1 dining hall, 6 fast-casual restaurants, 1 P.O.D Market, and 1 marketplace. <br/><br/>Both campuses have good accessibility to all their dining options, even though Downtown lacks many options compared to Tempe. Dining halls also have good accessibility for students who have meal plans. Affordability did vary among locations, it seemed as though many of the healthier restaurants were either too expensive or, in the case of Engrained on the Tempe campus, open for a short amount of time. The fast-casual restaurants seemed to be more affordable and appear in larger amounts than the healthier options. Marketplaces on campus lack fresh food to choose from, so they also promote the habit of poor eating choices. For acceptability, all dining options are popular on campus and accept payments in cash, card, or Maroon & Gold Dollars (M&G). <br/><br/>Overall, the food environment at ASU seems to favor more unhealthy food options. Students do not have much of a choice when needing to find food on campus because there is a lack of fresh ingredients or a kitchen to use. There are also barriers that risk promoting poor food choice that needs to be addressed to solve this problem.
Health and Wealthness is a podcast where your hosts, Emily Weigel and Hanaa Khan discuss pressing and trending topics about health and wealth that everyone should know about. Our first four episodes focus on the opioid crisis. Both the science and healthcare sides. We then go on to talk about burnout and mental health in a conversational episode.
Our current understanding of the mitochondrial genome was revolutionized in 2015 with the discovery of short open reading frames (sORFs) that produced protein products called mitochondrial-derived peptides (MDPs). Interestingly, unlike other proteins produced by the organelle, these MDPs are not directly involved in the electron transport chain but rather serve the role of metabolic regulators. In particular, one of these peptides called MOTS-c has been shown to regulate glucose and fat metabolism in an AMPK-dependent manner. With its capacity to enter the mitochondria and impact gene expression, MOTS-c has also displayed the ability to increase aerobic exercise performance by triggering elevated synthesis of the HO-1 antioxidant. Overall these findings position MOTS-c as a promising treatment for metabolic diseases as well as a potential dietary supplement to boost ATP availability.
Disclaimer: The initial goal of this project was to present this information as a podcast episode as a part of a series aimed at teaching the general public about human physiological adaptations. Due to the circumstances with COVID-19 we were unable to meet to make a final recording of the podcast episode. A recording of a practice session recorded earlier in the year has been uploaded instead and is therefore only a rough draft.
Disclaimer: Due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, the final outcomes of this project were impacted and limited. Therefore, the rough draft practice podcast session has been uploaded to accompany the written thesis portion as final recordings could not be recorded at this time.