Teresa Fung Dispenses Nutritional Advice to Students

Most undergraduates have read her work. In fact, this woman is probably as widely-read here as Darwin, Marx and Plato.

She is Teresa T. Fung, nutrition consultant for Harvard Dining Services (HDS). She brings a message to students each week via the "Nutrition Bites" column on the table tents in every dining hall.

Fung, who grew up in Hong Kong, says she realized how central food was to life when she watched her father get together with his friends to eat pasta on nights before they ran marathons.

"Food is not just for surviving, but influences your performance and is an occasion for family and social gathering," she says.

As an undergraduate at Cornell University a decade ago, Fung says she decided to major in nutrition because she noticed how increasingly important diet was becoming in our health-conscious society.

Fung subsequently became a registered dietitian, or a R.D.

Now she is working on her doctorate in nutrition at the School of Public Health so she can teach and train other dietitians and conduct research on the spread of epidemics.

In putting together nutritional advice for 6,400 undergraduates each week, Fung says her greatest challenge is in gathering an appropriate amount of information for her column, which must run around 170 words.

"I don't want to give Harvard students something they can just read in magazines," she says. "I want to give them something deep and substantial."

Teresa J. Chung '98, who reads the "Nutrition Bites" column, says that Fung provides students with new, informative facts.

"I think they are kind of interesting to read," she says. "Like last week, I didn't know that tofu has calcium."

For the weekly advice, Fung says she combines the latest in dietary findings with basic nutritional information she knows from her training.

"The most important part of [the advice] is that it is relevant to student life," she says.

Judith H. Danovitch '00 and Nadia L. Titarchuk '00 calculated their body mass index and compared them with standards provided by Fung in her column a few months ago.

While Titarchuk thinks the column is a good idea, she does not think the advice is taken seriously.

"I think very few people change their eating habits because of a little blurb," she says.

Anwar N. Floyd-Pruitt '99 says he seldom reads the column because he is usually socializing during meals. Furthermore, he says the column sometimes makes him regret what he is eating.

"I don't like to read things about nutrition because I feel guilty," he says.

Fung says that when she is putting together the nutritional advice, she might encounter conflicting studies. Therefore, her strategy is to look at all of the evidence.

"The main thing about interpreting scientific evidence is that you can't just look at one paper," she says. "It is one piece of evidence, one piece of the puzzle, [so] we should take a look at the whole picture."

According to Fung, it is the diet as a whole that should be our health concern. Variety, she says, is especially important.

"A health-conscious person is not someone who eats salads and tofu, and never ice cream," she says. "It's not like that."

Fung says her favorite food to indulge in once in a while is dark chocolate, especially truffles.

Fung started writing the column this year after replacing former nutrition consultant Shirley Hung, who wrote it for four years.

In addition to writing nutritional advice, Fung answers questions via e-mail that students have about their diets. She says she gets about one or two inquiries a month, but would like to receive more.

Fung says she currently has no influence over the daily menu or the nutritional content cards that go above the entrees at every meal.

Dining Services makes those decisions, she says.

As a student working toward a doctorate degree, Fung is taking four classes and doing 10 to 15 hours of research per week on the relationship between diet and skin cancer.

"I'm also a typical Harvard student, I suppose," she says, "although grad students lead a different kind of life."