Dorm Proximity to Cafeteria May Matter in 'Freshman 15'

Aug. 3, 2010— -- With her freshman year at college just around the corner, 18-year-old Ariel Scharf of Arlington, Va. has a lot going on.

But amid the preparations for moving in at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., she is adding one more item to her priority list -- she has started an exercise regimen.

"I'm 5-foot-1 and 108 pounds," she said. "I'm tiny, so any weight gain is really obvious."

Scharf said she hopes to carry this routine into her first year of college in order to avoid the dreaded "freshman 15" -- the extra 15 pounds new college students are said to pack on in their first couple of semesters on campus.

Now, new research suggests that the proximity of a freshman's dorm to dining facilities may play a part in at least some of this weight gain.

The article, co-authored by Kandice Kapinos of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Olga Yakusheva of the Department of Economics at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisc., was published online in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

"We know that there are other factors that influence weight gain -- such as genetics and social environment -- so we were not even expecting the physical environment effects to be close to five pounds," Kapinos said in a press statement.

The study examined the weight gain of 388 freshmen at Marquette University. The students were assigned randomly to seven different dormitories. Four of these dorms had onsite dining halls, and they were varying distances to the two campus gymnasiums open to the students.

Drawing information from the students' self-reports on how many meals they ate each day, how many times per week they exercised and how much weight they gained or lost, the researchers found that female students in dorms with dining halls weighed almost two pounds more and exercised nearly one and a half fewer times per week than those living in dorms without dining halls.

"This is the first time that 18-year-olds are on their own and really independently making their own food choices," said Lisa Cimperman, a registered dietitian at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland. "If there's not a conscious effort made to eat a healthy diet, I think it's really easy to eat a poor diet in college, unfortunately."

Curiously, though, the findings did not appear to apply to male students.

This and other aspects of the research puzzled some diet and exercise experts, who noted that a different research approach may be needed in order to validate the findings of the study.