The 50 Healthiest Colleges in America
From New York to California, these are the schools making healthy choices at mealtime
The 50 Healthiest Colleges in America
By TIME Labs
Published August 26, 2015

You are, they say, what you eat. So as approximately 20 million students head back to college this fall, we got to wondering just what they will be eating. The truth may lie somewhere at the bottom of America’s takeout orders.

Online food delivery company GrubHub, which now serves more than 20 million meals each quarter, analyzed delivery orders sent to more than 100 colleges in 47 states during the 2014-2015 academic year to see which students are making healthy choices at meal time. (The company used e-mail addresses ending in .edu to determine which orders came from people associated with college and universities.)

The University of Buffalo, home to 30,000, students, leads the competition when it comes to making healthy choices when students log online for food delivery. To determine the most health conscious schools, GrubHub analyze deliveries, looking for the highest percentage of orders at schools that contained any of 31 options which suggested students had made healthy food choices, like substituting a salad for another side dish or telling restaurants to go light on dressing.

What schools are most often ordering vegetables? The University of North Carolina tops the list, according to GrubHub’s analysis, followed by University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, Harvard University and the University of Virginia.

For the complete list of healthiest colleges, see below.

HEALTHIEST COLLEGES

  1. University of Buffalo
  2. St. John’s University
  3. UC Davis
  4. Southern Illinois University
  5. The City University of New York
  6. University of Notre Dame
  7. Florida International University
  8. Fordham University
  9. American University
  10. University of California – Berkeley
  11. Miami University
  12. James Madison University
  13. Georgetown University
  14. University of Arizona
  15. Clemson University
  16. Northeastern University
  17. University of Florida
  18. The College of New Jersey
  19. Monmouth University
  20. Florida State University
  21. Vanderbilt University
  22. New Jersey Institute of Technology
  23. Rider University
  24. Manhattan College
  25. Elon University
  26. University of Delaware
  27. Yale University
  28. Villanova University
  29. Johns Hopkins University
  30. University of Tennessee
  31. Arizona State University
  32. University of Southern California
  33. Columbia University
  34. Fashion Institute of Technology
  35. Rowan University
  36. University of South Carolina
  37. Purdue University
  38. Suffolk University
  39. University of Illinois
  40. University of Illinois – Chicago
  41. New York University
  42. Johnson & Wales University
  43. Kent State
  44. University of California – Los Angeles
  45. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  46. Roosevelt University
  47. Wesleyan University
  48. Boston College
  49. Eastern Michigan University
  50. Adelphi University
Photo: Danny Kim for TIME