People talk about the mental health issues faced by the college students such as anxiety, depression, and stress but little do people talk about the physical health effects on college students. Personal challenges to a student life can be anything from homesickness to mental health struggles to physical health issues. College time is the elevated risk problems for health problems of many students especially those who live in a different city away from their home. College student’s dietary and lifestyle suddenly undergoes tremendous changes. The case of obesity has been continuing to increase as their physical fitness decreases as soon as they enter the college. College students are amongst those people who are easily prone to diseases due to their poor lifestyle, time management and hectic schedule.
There are many physical health issues faced by students in their hostel/PG life:
- Food poisoning – One of the major physical health that college students suffer from is food poisoning. The food that are college students often provided with by their hostel or PG are often made in large quantity and not often prepared in hygienic conditions. Due to this, students often suffer from food poisoning and sometimes can also get admitted in the hospital. Food poisoning has symptoms like nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, and fever.
- Stomach flu – Stomach flu (gastroenteritis) is caused by contagious viruses that spread from person to person. These viruses spread among people by coughing or having physical contact. College students meet a lot of people in the college campus and can easily come in contact with one such flu.
- Obesity (gaining a lot of weight) – Students often avoid having hostel/PG food as they lack taste so they tend to opt for a tastier option that is junk food. Junk food as we all know does not have a single positive benefit on the body, it just satisfies our taste buds. It contains fattening products due to which students gain a lot of weight which is not easy to lose.
- Unhygienic lifestyle – Living in a hostel/PG students have to share to common washrooms due to which they get prone to different types of infections. And due to time management students tend to wear the same unwashed clothes more than once. Wearing dirty clothes can harbor microorganisms and wearing clothes with these microorganisms on them can lead to skin infections.
- Dehydration – Among other physical health issues, the most common is dehydration that is faced by college students. College students enjoy drinking carbonated drinks and water gets under consumed due to which they suffer from dehydration.
Students can easily tackle these health issues simply by making small changes in their eating habits and their lifestyle.
