College Students Skipping Meals and Binge Drinking
A worrisome epidemic of skipped meals and binge drinking is spreading across college campuses and women seem to be particularly vulnerable. Universities are conducting their own studies which uncover a sad tale of disordered eating and drinking afflicting their student bodies.
Not long ago the University of Missouri surveyed 1,000 students and learned that a substantial segment of the student population is choosing not to buy groceries or eat meals but is choosing instead to binge on alcohol. The survey says that college students do so in order to save money and slim down.
The behavior has been labeled “drunkorexia” since it combines disordered eating and drinking habits. Drunkorexia was reported by 25 percent of the females surveyed and by 11 percent of the men. Researchers believe that perhaps 16 percent of the overall university population is succumbing to the habit.
It isn’t unusual for college kids to be short on cash, nor is it unheard of for university students to skip meals because of financial straits. However, these young adults are intentionally re-allocating grocery dollars towards alcohol. The thinking is that with less food in the stomach, drunkenness will arrive sooner. The disordered eating-drinking seems to afflict women three times as often as it does men.
The University of Missouri study mirrors what researchers found in a previous University of North Carolina study. That study surveyed 13,000 female students. Researchers learned that women with disordered eating were actually more comfortable admitting to the abuse of alcohol than they were confessing to anorexia or bulimia. Nevertheless, women who were abusing alcohol were, in fact, more likely to suffer from an eating disorder.
College kids make plenty of bad decisions, but one wonders if they are aware of the serious health risks which can result from drunkorexia, such as:
- Severe eating disorders and problems with addiction
- Starving the brain and ingesting toxins can lead to short- and long-term cognitive issues such as inability to study, concentrate or make simple decisions.
- Those who combine disordered eating and binge drinking are at a greater risk for risky sex encounters, violence, substance abuse, alcohol poisoning and future chronic health problems.
- Women are at particular risk since their bodies metabolize alcohol more slowly than men’s bodies. The alcohol will make them sick faster and take longer to work out of their system, which means they will experience vital organ damage sooner than men.
It would be a tragedy for eating disorders among college students to simply be brushed off as typical of college life. Surely no one considers it normal to fixate on personal appearance to the point of poisoning your body or to use self-induced vomiting to control weight. Such actions are crying out for someone to dig under the surface to identify what pain is leading to self-destructive patterns.
