Four Boston Universities Made GrubHub’s Healthiest Colleges List

Northeastern University photo by Wally Gobetz via Flickr/Creative Commons

According to a new study, some Boston college students are actually pretty good at avoiding the Freshman 15.

Food delivery site GrubHub analyzed the orders sent to more than 100 colleges nationwide over the course of the 2014-2015 academic year to determine which students were choosing the healthiest meals. Though the site found that college students, in general, were 24 percent less likely to order nutritious choices than non-college customers, they looked at 31 indicators of health—like choosing a side salad over fries, brown rice instead of white, going light on dressings and toppings, and ordering veggie-heavy meals—to then rank the schools based on how many students made those healthy choices.

The University of Buffalo topped the healthiest colleges list (what, no Buffalo wings?), but a handful of Boston schools made the top 50. Northeastern was the highest-ranked local school, at number 16, followed by Suffolk at 38, MIT at 45, and Boston College at 48. Interestingly, Harvard was found to be one of the schools that ordered the most vegetables, but it didn’t crack the overall top 50.

Of course, GrubHub’s study didn’t take other measures of health, like on-campus dining options, fitness programs, and drinking and smoking rates, into account. The analysis also only included orders that came from .edu email addresses, which many students likely don’t use when a 1 a.m. takeout craving hits. Still, it’s good to see that our city’s higher education institutions seem to be offering a nutrition course or two.