Return to
  Cover

Eat up when you’re down

Terrorist attacks. War. Economic uncertainty. No wonder Americans are stressed out and depressed. But instead of heading to the pharmacy for relief they might want to try the kitchen first, says Susan Algert, a Sac State family and consumer sciences professor and registered dietician.

“What people eat and when they eat it can affect the way they feel,” she says. “Eating the right foods at the right times can increase stamina, improve mood and outlook, and enhance immunity.”

Algert notes that the country is dealing with dramatic change and people wonder if they’re capable of adapting. “But,” she says, “diet is something that they can control. And it can have an impact.”

To help counteract depression, Algert recommends a low-fat diet featuring lean protein during the day and carbohydrates at night along with plenty of fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and lots of water. Lean, high-protein foods like eggs, dairy, lean meats, fish, poultry and legumes, boost the immune system and increase the production of dopamine in the body, which makes people more alert and energized. Carbohydrates produce serotonin, which can calm and relax.

Algert also recommends taking supplements. Certain key nutrients, including magnesium, Vitamin B6, zinc and Vitamin E assist with metabolism and can help reduce stress.

Acknowledging that not everyone can cook every day, Algert says that there are easy ways to get the necessary protein and carbohydrates. “Breakfast could be low-fat dairy or soy like yogurt or a smoothie,” she says. “For a snack have nuts, cheese sticks, a protein bar or a juice-based protein drink. Lunch could be a sandwich of lean turkey, tuna or egg salad made with egg whites, tofu, fish, cottage cheese or peanut butter.”

She also recommends having a small evening meal featuring some protein and an
8 p.m. snack like crackers with milk, fruit, a salad with cottage cheese or pasta with a little cheese.

And, she adds, “Cookies and milk never hurt.”

Electrifying ride

Sac State is fifth among U.S. universities in using work-study to promote community service, according to rankings in January’s Washington Monthly.

The magazine says Sac State uses 44.5 percent of its roughly $2.2 million in work-study funds to help pay students in community service jobs. Nationally, the average four-year university dedicates less than 12 percent of its funds to community service.

“This has been something that has really grown on this campus,” says Patty Schindler, who coordinates work-study jobs in the Sac State financial aid office. “Many students who were placed in these jobs end up changing their majors entirely and going to work for non-profits. They’ve become our contacts when we’re trying to place current students.”

Work-study is a federal, need-based financial aid program that helps students with part-time employment, paying 70 to 100 percent of their salaries. It was established in the 1960s with the goal of helping students while promoting community involvement. The more than 3,000 participating universities are required to dedicate at least 7 percent of their work-study funds to community service work.

In its article, “The Other College Rankings,” the Washington Monthly looked at universities that receive at least $250,000 in federal aid. Sac State was ranked fifth nationally, fourth among public universities and second among California universities behind UC Riverside.

About 900 Sac State students receive work-study aid each year. They work for such organizations as America Reads, St. Hope Academy, Sacramento Food Bank and Legal Services of Northern California.

In fact, Sac State students generally have shown a strong inclination to serve their community. In addition to those with work-study jobs in community service, fully 40 percent of Sac State students perform community service as volunteers. More than 1,000 students take classes with a service-learning component. And throughout the CSU system, students contribute about 33.6 million hours of community service every year.

Details: www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0201.green.

(back to top)

They aren’t on eBay yet, but there’s a cool set of collectibles available on campus—a line of “sports cards” featuring Sac State police officers. The cards, which were first printed a year ago, are designed to raise the department’s profile on campus.

“Whenever we do customer satisfaction surveys, one thing we always hear is, ‘We don’t see enough cops,’” says Police Chief Ken Barnett. “Unfortunately, there are only so many of us. This is one way to increase our visibility.”

The cards are similar in style to a trading card and feature individual officers’ photos on the front. The back lists background information and a safety tip. For example, Barnett’s card reminds people to “Always report crimes and suspicious activities promptly!”

“It’s a way to put a name with a face,” Barnett says.

The push for the cards came when Barnett saw similar cards at a meeting a few years back and decided Sac State should be one of the first two university police departments in the California State University system to offer them. The other is CSU San Bernadino.

Barnett encourages officers to walk around buildings on campus to hand out the cards. “It’s a way to get officers out of their cars and interacting with people in a situation that is not related to a police call,” he says. They also take the cards when they do presentations to campus groups. There are even some collectors.

Details: For your own cards, call Public Safety at (916) 278-7321.

When the vows break, don’t blame it on financial problems. Money is not the number one cause of divorce, says family and consumer sciences professor Jan Andersen.

Contrary to popular belief, there’s no proof that money issues are the major factor when marriages break up, Andersen says. “I had heard ‘money is the number one cause of divorce’ in seminars and read articles that quoted it. But I realized I had never seen any evidence to back it, so I decided to look into it further,” he says.

What he found is that no research supports the assumption beyond a 1950s study where “nonsupport” was ranked as the number one cause. Otherwise money was never cited as higher than fourth or fifth.

For his own research, Andersen looked at a national database of more than 2,000 husband and wife households. The data was collected over a 12-year period from 1980-92. Andersen zeroed in on questions related to money to see if financial trouble in one time period predicted the likelihood of divorce in a future time period.

The result—as predictors of divorce, financial problems are useless. “It was a non-finding that was quite interesting,” he says. “Financial problems never explained more than 5 percent of the variability in divorce.

“If financial problems are so important, there would have been a stronger relationship. They appear to be merely a small part of the mix.”

Andersen speculates that financial issues may not be as important as they once were when the husband was expected to be the sole breadwinner. The 1950s study used 1948 data from women only. Now, Andersen says, both spouses have expectations of bringing in money.

“Or, perhaps,” he says, “financial problems were never a major factor in most divorces, but were cited by respondents in earlier studies because they were legally or socially acceptable reasons for divorce.”

(back to top)

The “right to carry cola” can hardly be considered an inalienable right. But it’s a freedom that was denied to many visitors to this year’s Winter Olympic Games. And for recreation and leisure studies professor Richard Batty, that’s a sure sign the influence of corporate sponsorship is beginning to infringe on civil rights.

“The controls sponsors put on the Olympics and the host city are quite draconian,” says Batty who has done research on the costs of sports sponsorship. “They now require a ‘clean zone’ free of advertising. It raises real issues of civil rights. In many cases these are public areas and people are being told what they can wear or carry.”

Sydney, for example, had boundaries around Olympic venues where visitors were not allowed to bring in competing sponsors’ products. “Journalists had to tape over the brand names on their laptops and cameras if they were competitors of the official Olympic sponsor,” he says.

And at the Salt Lake City games, an employee had cola confiscated from his lunchbox because it wasn’t the official Olympic sponsor’s brand, according to a report in Sports Illustrated.

The Olympics aren’t alone in bowing to sponsor pressure. Similar restrictions apply to many other major events like the NCAA Final Four, he adds.

“Sponsorship is always billed as ‘win-win’—the sponsor gets associated with a team or event, and the team or event gets wads of cash. But there are costs on either side,” he says. “It’s not money for nothing, and the checks aren’t for free.”

Though sponsorship issues occur in other areas of society—such as Sac State’s affiliation with a cola company—sports is the obvious extreme, since 80 percent of sponsorship is associated with sports, Batty says.

With sponsorship, there is an expectation of giving up control, Batty says. He notes that football has changed the pacing of the game to accommodate the needs of sponsors, pointing to the two-minute warning and stoppage of play on change of possession. Other sports, such as basketball, take “TV timeouts” to
satisfy the demands of sponsors and the media.

And there’s another cost, Batty says, a cost that’s hidden—the erosion of good will. “The sponsor doesn’t bear the cost straightaway but there’s an imaginary line they can push supporters to,” Batty says.

(back to top)

• Fully 98 percent of regularly admitted Sac State freshmen returning this year were proficient in math and English. That’s after 68 percent needed remediation of some kind when they arrived in fall 2000, indicating the campus is successfully bringing continuing students up to CSU standards.
  
  
• Sac State made Yahoo’s latest top 200 most “wired colleges” list, coming in 120th among more than 1,300 universities surveyed. That put Sac State fourth in the California State University system and 12th in the state. The University’s highest mark in the six-category survey was in “e-learning.”
  
  
• Sac State researchers and the California Institute for County Government unveiled the new “CSUS Forecast” in January. The forecast, which provides a gauge of the Capital Region’s economic health, predicted the region will avoid the big employment declines plaguing much of the country.
  
  
• Among the many art exhibits on campus this spring was “City at State,” which highlighted the work of Sacramento City College students. Many of those students will likely attend Sac State someday—more than 600
  Sacramento City College students transfer here each year.
  

(back to top)

Many Sac State community service programs allow students to get professional experience. The students are supervised by experienced professors.

Among them is the division of nursing, which requires students to finish a project with a health agency or community group. Every year, nursing students implement and evaluate as many as two dozen projects, which have included a survey of pregnant homeless women, a booklet on breastfeeding and a child safety awareness fair.

For nursing information call (916) 278-6714. For other student programs, e-mail infodesk@csus.edu or call (916) 278-6156.

Return to
  Cover