Campus food services are harming students by failing to provide nutritious options and adequate education about healthy choices.
When student were to stroll through Queen’s campus between classes, familiar signs come into view: Tim Hortons in the Queen’s Centre and Biosciences Complex, a Pizza Pizza in the Student Centre, and other quick-serve vendors cluster where students need a quick bite the most. We’ve come to accept these storefronts as part of university life: caffeine before lab, a slice between seminars, fries during an all-nighter. But convenience comes at a cost.
The steady availability of calorie-dense, highly processed food on campus has real consequences for students’ physical health, mental well-being, and, most importantly, their ability to learn. The University should approach on-campus food as an academic concern, not merely a retail offering.
The University’s “What’s Open” page shows real-time hours, but the busiest outlets often serve calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods. This isn’t unique to Queen’s; global studies show that coffee shops, takeout counters, and pizza chains regularly feature items high in calories, salt, sugar, and saturated fat.
The stakes extend well beyond waistlines. Emerging, high-grade evidence, including a systematic review in Nutrients published by the National Library of Medicine, links diet quality to both mental health and academic performance in university students. For example, a Cambridge University Press study found that individuals in the highest quartile of
ultra-processed food consumption had about 81 percent higher odds of reporting mild depression than those in the lowest quartile.
Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses summarized in PLOS ONE show that higher overall diet quality is associated with reduced depression, anxiety, and stress levels, improved sleep, and moderately enhanced academic performance. In short, what students eat affects concentration, mood regulation, exam resilience, and the cognitive processes necessary to absorb complex material.
For a student population already coping with tight budgets, academic stress, and disrupted sleep, constant exposure to fast and ultra-processed food erodes the very conditions required for learning.
Physical health effects are just as significant. Ultra-processed diets are linked to difficulty achieving or maintaining a healthy weight, elevated risk factors for metabolic disease, and chronically low energy levels, a vicious loop where fatigue drives poor food choices, which in turn sap energy and willpower.
A recent clinical trial and meta-reviews summarized in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition show that ultra-processed diets lead to less weight loss and worse metabolic outcomes even when calorie intake is similar, suggesting that the level of processing itself plays a role. That becomes a public-health problem when students have daily, easy access to these foods.
Individual choices matter, but campus culture shapes behaviour.
Students eat what’s most visible, affordable, and fast. When the restaurant-scape favours high-margin quick-serve outlets, healthy eating becomes the exception rather than the rule. Research summarized in ScienceDirect shows that calorie labelling, default healthier options, nutrition subsidies on salads and fruit, and procurement shifts toward minimally processed products can nudge young adults toward better purchases.
Queen’s can use its buying power and meal-plan system to make healthy options easier and less costly, not harder and more expensive.
Practical steps are within reach. The University can start by mapping the problem through an annual report on the campus “food environment,” detailing vendor locations, product quality, price comparisons, and student usage, so that progress can be tracked through transparency.
At the same time, Queen’s can work with on-campus vendors and franchise partners to ensure at least one highly visible, easily accessible healthy choice, such as salads, grain bowls, fresh fruit, or protein-based sandwiches, is available in every major student hub, with prices kept competitive. Considering how standardized corporate menus tend to be, this goal may be harder to achieve with outside chains than with student-run outlets.
Additionally, targeted subsidies for healthy meals, perhaps through meal-plan credits or a “healthy meal swipe,” would make affordability a right rather than a privilege. Counselling, academic advising, and health services should coordinate campaigns to incorporate nutrition into mental-health and academic-success planning.
Students themselves should help shape vendor contracts and menu choices to ensure that interventions remain acceptable, effective, and long-lasting. This is not about villainizing Pizza Pizza or Tim Hortons; franchises are social enterprises and undeniably convenient, but about balance and accountability.
Campus food policy is academic policy. When diet choices compromise sleep, mood, and concentration, education suffers. Queen’s students already face high tuition, demanding courses, and fierce career pressures; they shouldn’t also have to fight an environment that steers them toward the least healthy options.
University leaders, dining services, and student representatives can make subtle but powerful changes. Healthier defaults and focused subsidies wouldn’t only improve menus but also strengthen students’ ability to learn, thrive, and graduate equipped to lead. The University has the means and the responsibility to act.
Let’s make this a campus where smart people eat well and therefore learn better.
Hunter Bienias-Green is a second-year history and political studies student
Tags
Campus food, Health and wellness, Nutrition, Opinions, Queen's administration
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