Ditch the Ramen! Here Comes Health for Students!
Contributors: Annie Li (Project Lead), Joanna Wang, Joyce Jeon (Team Jaja)
Introduction (Here we present…)
Do you cook as a college student? If so, how often? If you live off-campus and without much access to on-campus dining halls, you might be currently cooking for yourselves, or at least have seriously considered this somewhat affordable and healthy option. Moreover, under the circumstances of COVID-19, college students’ cooking might have become even more prevalent due to diners and food banks closing, hygiene concerns, and students being stuck at home and not having many ways to kill their time but staring at cooking recipes and thinking about how much salt should be added to the soup.
However, while you might be enjoying the chicken soup you just made, are you aware that your cooking choices might have some trends with some other factors as well? According to An Exploration of College Students’ Cooking Behavior and Factors That Influence That Behavior Using Social Cognitive Theory, researchers have found that many factors affect students’ cooking behaviors and obesity rate, such as attitudes and cooking knowledge. Moreover, your cooking behaviors might be a predictor of even more factors, such as GPA and profession.
In this article, our team examines the possible trends and relationships between college students’ cooking behaviors and income & profession, academic performance, cultural background, and exercising habits using Kaggle datasets of college students’ cooking choices. This dataset consists of 126 raw responses from students regarding their food choices, nutrition, preferences, childhood favorites, and other information. In this article, you will read about the potential hidden relationships between your frequency of cooking, your breakfast choices, to your GPAs and income.
We hope this data will be useful to you when thinking about your cooking choices in the future. My chicken soup smells great, and what about yours?:)
Income & Profession (How do student millionaires usually cook?)
Do you think college students with higher income usually cook for themselves? Do they cook because they have the wealth to support various cooking choices, or do they cook less because simply they are too busy and don’t have the time? What’s more, if we assume that college students’ incomes are related to their cooking styles, are these affected by their parents’ profession as well. Based on the data from Kaggle, we examined the trends between college students’ cooking frequency, their income, and their parents’ profession.
Based on the data, students are grouped according to their cooking frequency, which we described as 5 categories: every day, often, sometimes, seldom, and never. These 5 categories each correspond to the following 5 responses in the original survey:
Every day — Every day
Often — A couple of times a week
Sometimes — Whenever I can, but that is not very often
Seldom — I only help a little during holidays
Never — Never, I really do not know my way around a kitchen
Then, within their own group of cooking frequency, we analyzed their income ranges using a boxplot. From the graph above, we can see that college students that never cook have the highest income median, followed by college students who seldom cook. There might be due to the fact that some students with high income might be too busy to cook because of their work, other rich students might simply take the option of eating out or ordering take-out. Following the two groups with the highest income, we get that students who cook every day have the median income in the 3rd place and students who cook often and sometimes have the lowest income of all. When considering students who cook often, there might be two major reasons behind that. For one, cooking themselves might be a more affordable option for some students because the ingredients tend to be cheaper. For another, some students might choose to cook on their own because homemade food might be a healthier and more customizable option. Thus, different reasons for cooking may result in a high variation of money spent on cooking, reflecting the variety of students’ income levels. This might be a reason why we see the ranges of income from students who cook every day, often, and sometimes are higher than those from students who seldom and never cook.
Parents’ profession VS cooking frequency:
Based on the data, we also visualize parents’ professions according to students’ cooking frequency using word clouds. From the graphs above, there is not an obvious difference among students with different cooking frequencies. The most common profession of parents within all groups are teachers, followed by business owner, dentist, and lawyer.
Academic Performance (…)
When we first think of college students or college in general, we think of 2 G’s: Grades and Goods (late night boba runs, instant ramen cravings). Students constantly worry about how well they performed on a midterm, if their final paper had no grammatical errors, or if their presentation was loud and clear enough. Studies have shown that nutrition plays a significant role in the academic performance of students. Using the Food Choices data set from Kaggle, we analyzed how college students’ food choices and general lifestyle have an impact on their GPAs.
Diet Type vs. GPA:
From this dataset, participants were asked to label their own diet types: a healthy/balanced/moderate diet, an unhealthy/cheap/too much/random diet, a repetitive diet, or an unclear diet. Using a heat map, it was possible to analyze the correlation between the different diet types and GPA. The only diet type that yielded a positive correlation with GPA was a healthy and balanced diet, with a correlation of 0.12. Although, this is not a significantly high GPA, it was the only diet type out of the 4 choices that had any sort of positive correlation.
Eating Changes vs. GPA
Coming to college, one of the most noticeable changes to a student’s lifestyle is their eating changes. Going from having their parents cook meals for them and having access to a plethora of nutritious ingredients, students rely on dining hall food and snacks such as ramen and other easy and convenient foods. Naturally, it became curious to analyze the relationship between eating changes and the GPA of college students. Eating changes were grouped from a scale of 1 through 13:
- Eat Faster
- Bigger Quantity (of food)
- Worse Quality
- Same Food
- Healthier
- Unclear
- Drink Coffee
- Less Food
- More Sweets
- Timing
- More Carbs/Snacking
- Drink More Water
- More Variety
Surprisingly, rather than a healthier eating change having the largest effect on students’ GPA, the increase in coffee consumption was correlated with a higher GPA. This may be because of a multitude of reasons, such as college students having to stay up late at night to finish assignments and study for multiple courses. Students who ate faster were correlated with having a lower GPA, relative to the other 12 eating changes in the data set. Eating fast is linked to health problems and overall a less nutritious lifestyle, which may be a reason as to why this specific factor is correlated with the lowest mean GPA in the dataset.
Exercise vs GPA
A healthy lifestyle does not consist of only food and diet; exercise is just as important an element to lead a healthy lifestyle. Oftentimes, students find it difficult or inconvenient to find time to incorporate exercise into their daily schedule, often prioritizing academics or social activities. Hopefully, findings from this swarm plot will encourage students to exercise more, as there is a positive relationship between exercise and a higher GPA. The number of times each student exercised per week were labeled from a 1 to 3 scale where:
- Exercise Everyday
- Twice or Three times a week
- Once a Week
Looking at the swarm plot, the highest GPAs from students in the dataset were from those who exercised at least twice a week. Those who exercised every day versus those who exercised twice/three times a week barely saw any difference in GPA; however, those who only exercised once a week had a noticeably lower GPA compared to those who exercised more often.
Cultural Backgrounds (How do backgrounds influence students’ diets?)
When people say “you are what you eat,” it’s hard not to agree that what we’ve been eating since our childhood has some sort of impact on what we are eating as college students. Each student has their own definition of a “homemade meal,” consisting of various cultural cuisines and cooking methods. Growing up, we are accustomed to the taste of home, so adjusting to the college diet is a journey for us all. Our cultural background may play a role in determining the kind of food we enjoy as well, whether it being religious, family background, where you were raised, or how you were raised. Using the Food Choices dataset from Kaggle, we analyzed how cultural backgrounds can correlate with college students’ eating choices.
This visualization displays the correlation between students’ favorite cuisine and their current diet, with red meaning healthy, orange meaning unhealthy, yellow meaning balanced three meals throughout the day, and green meaning no comment. The favorite cuisines are coded in the following manner:
0 — none
1 — Italian
2 — Mexican
3 — Turkish
4 — Asian
5 — American
6 — African
7 — Jamaican
8 — Indian
From the visualization, we can tell that overall, unhealthy meals take up a large percentage in each of the favorite cuisines, meaning that reasonably, college students are consuming less healthy food currently versus when they were at home. Looking at the breakdown more specifically, Italian food wins the most popular favorite cuisine among its choices, and students who enjoy it report they are eating rather unhealthy at the moment. Asian is another popular cuisine, and it seems like more of the sample are eating healthy rather than unhealthy. Therefore, while college students in general are not eating as healthy as they would wish, different favorite cuisines correlate with the students’ food choices currently.
This visualization illustrates the students’ ideal diet versus how their eating habits change. The ideal diet is coded in the following way:
1 — small portioned meal
2 — healthy with fruit and vegetable
3 — healthy and balanced meal
4 — less sweet
5 — organic and home cooked food
6 — similar to what I eat now
7 — high protein
8 — no comment
And the eating changes are coded as:
1 — eating more unhealthy food and snacks
2 — eating more healthy food
3 — no change
4 — no comment
From the graph above, we can notice that all the categories experienced some sort of diet changes upon coming into college, but their ideal diet differentiates their eating changes. Students who eat fruit and vegetable experienced all eating changes — from eating more healthy to more unhealthy or no change. Therefore, it seems like while maintaining a healthy college diet is difficult, it is still obtainable. However, it is also easy to shift into either a more healthy or unhealthy diet, so personal control and beliefs may play a role in this. It is also interesting to note that students who eat less sweet either ate more unhealthy or more healthy, no there was no “no change”, so it looks like maintaining a less sweet diet is rather difficult.
This visualization showcases the students’ ethnic food correlated to their comfort food reasons, with the reasons coded in the following way:
1 — stress
2 — boredom
3 — sadness
4 — hunger
5 — lazy
6 — sich
7 — happiness
8 — anxious
9 — no comment
Looking at the boxplot, students with “1” as their ethnic food have a common comfort food reason as boredom, while students with “2” as their ethnic food have a common comfort food reason as hunger. Therefore, it seems like no matter what ethnic food students consumed when growing up, their primary current reason for seeking comfort food is their current physical and mental condition.
Exercising Habits (I saw him in the gym all day…Does he likely cook often?)
Lastly, if you go to the gym, or your friends go to the gym, or you go on social media and watch work-out videos, you might have experienced or seen the following pretty often: a food box filled with beautifully arranged broccoli, chicken breasts, and other healthy food and snacks. It might be the case that a lot of the workout food is homemade. Using the data on cooking and exercising frequency, we draw the following violin graph.
Similarly, students are grouped according to their cooking frequency: every day, often, sometimes, seldom, and never, which correspond to each of the following 5 responses respectively:
Every day — Every day
Often — A couple of times a week
Sometimes — Whenever I can, but that is not very often
Seldom — I only help a little during holidays
Never — Never, I really do not know my way around a kitchen
Based on the visualization above, we can see that students who cook every day have the highest exercise time per week of all. The reason behind this might be that for students who exercise on a daily basis, they might be really aware of their eating habits and thus cook themselves to ensure a healthy diet. They can go to the groceries only for healthy food and don’t need to worry about the extra salad dressing from restaurants or take-outs. The groups of students who exercise 2nd most regularly are, students who never cook. While this may seem a bit surprising, it might simply be the case that this group of students might overlap with the students with high income. They can afford healthier, luxury places to maintain calorie control as well.
Conclusion (roll the credits!):
To sum up, our team analyzed the relationships and trends between college students’ cooking choices and their socioeconomic situations, academic performance, cultural backgrounds, and exercise habits. In terms of socioeconomic situations, students who never and seldom cook tend to have higher incomes, followed by students who cook every day. Students who followed a healthy/healthier diet and lifestyle, such as exercise, were found to be correlated with a higher GPA. Moreover, the professions of the parents of the students do not have a significant relationship with their cooking choices. Common tendencies within college students such as snacking more and drinking more coffee also showed to be related to a higher overall GPA as well. Looking at the cultural backgrounds, students’ favorite cuisines do not have much of a correlation with their current diet, and students with different ideal diets all experience some sort of eating changes upon coming into college. Last but not least, students who cook every day exercise the most during the week.
If you’re curious about how we created our visualizations, here is our GitHub repository!
