Picture this: you’re exhausted, but you got a full 8 hours of sleep. You find yourself losing focus during an exam, but you studied a week in advance. You’re increasingly unhappy, despite having a glaringly obvious reason to be so.

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The often-overlooked culprit? Nutrition.  

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The impact of consuming a nutritious diet manifests itself into several different aspects of life, starting most generally with basic health. As such, we decided to analyze the nutrition of both Lehigh students and students in the surrounding area.

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To do so, we started with an idea. Why would people care about their nutrition? What does it mean? For starters, nutritional guidelines are published by organizations like the American Heart Association because they matter. Nutritious eating and good overall health have gone hand-in-hand longer than the first food pyramid has been around. Thus, analysis of the nutritional baselines for schools like Lehigh provides a brief snapshot into how well college students are meeting dietary recommendations and how their diet then factors into life away from the dinner table.

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To study nutrition and its impact on Lehigh (and other) students, we started by drafting a survey on a program called Qualtrics. After rearranging the format and tweaking the wording of our questions what felt like an endless number of times, we distributed the survey to a sample of the Lehigh population and watched the results trickle in. We followed suit for Muhlenberg College and Lafayette College. 

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With our collected responses, we transferred them into Tableau, a data visualization software, to take a closer look at the numbers and the implications they presented. Having crafted and analyzed several data sets and graphic visualizations, we were able to step back at look at the bigger picture of our study.​

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For a closer look at our report, click through the tabs at the top of the page.