When community health senior Hannah Miller arrived as a freshman at Texas A&M, she didn’t lean into late-night DoorDash orders or a crowded bar scene every night; she found her passion in the kitchen. This inspired her to cook healthy foods and take into consideration how to correctly fuel her body, leading her to the career idea to become a personal chef and meal coach. This health-focused mindset represents a shift in reapproaching wellness and what college living looks like.

Miller realized in her freshman year that she had an opportunity to take control of her health, so she began cooking in order to prioritize healthy ingredients and reduce the amount of unhealthy foods she consumed.

According to a 2025 Pew Research report, about two-in-10 Americans describe their own diets as very healthy. The same study states that the roughly 29% of Americans who eat a home-cooked meal daily are more likely to describe their diets as healthier, compared to the 12% who eat at home less frequently. Only about 52% of Americans think about the healthiness of food when considering what to eat, and this lack of prioritization has fueled Miller’s decision to evolve her health-focused mindset into a way to help others.

“I realized a lot of the food out there, the fast food and just food at restaurants, are the lowest quality food, because people were out there just to make a bunch of money, not out to actually better people and get them healthy,” Miller said.

Miller began meal prepping and cooking for clients that consisted of anyone from college students to families in the Bryan-College Station area to educate them about health. She believes healthy food not only fuels people’s bodies but heals them, and prioritizing what you eat is the best way to improve your health.

“The biggest reward is seeing people heal whatever condition they have through food rather than medicine, and so they can use food as a tool to fuel their bodies,” Miller said. “So it has just been super rewarding seeing people that have PCOS [polycystic ovary syndrome] or people having pre-diabetes and stuff like that start eating healthy and sticking to their meal plans, and they go get their labs done, and they’re much healthier.”

For Miller, learning about healthy food is a simple and rewarding endeavor. 

Although the Pew study cites that roughly seven-in-10 Americans say the increased cost of healthy food has made eating it more difficult, Miller debunked this when it comes to all healthy eating. She noted that there are many online resources from the many Tik Tok accounts that share recipes to performing a quick google search to find healthy meals that can be achieved for a mere $3 a serving or meal prepped weekly for convenience.

“There’s ways around it;  you will be able to save money and save time, all while caring about your health,” Miller said. 

Motivated to take care of her health as well, marketing senior Cassandra Lozano began cooking and meal prepping from her apartment. Lozano’s desire to stay healthy, avoid sickness and keep count of the healthy or whole foods she eats helps her stay consistent in her academics.

“I meal prep on Sundays, and I usually go to a grocery store after church, and then I’ll buy everything and make it that day for the rest of the week,” Lozano said.

Lozano said that aside from the direct health benefits of eating clean foods, cooking for herself weekly has kept her in a consistent routine and even brought her closer to her roommates. For Lozano, meal-prepping has become a bonding time where she and her roommates can all cook together.

“I just like to cook with my roommates,” Lozano said. “It’s a really fun activity that we all get to do together, just building friendships with cooking and meal-prepping.”

Lozano said that more of her friends have started trying to cook and be healthy. She attributed a significant influence on healthy eating and recipe inspiration to social media apps such as Instagram and TikTok.

“I feel like a lot more people have started trying to cook and be healthy, and everything [on TikTok] is like more protein and promoting protein or health-based stuff,” Lozano said. “I’ll see a video of an influencer posting a recipe, and usually those are how-to videos that give the recipe and teach me how to cook it.”

Lozano balances having an internship and working as a student while still cooking and taking care of her health. She said meal-prepping for the week helps with being able to manage a busy schedule.

“I’m busy from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. every single day,” Lozano said. “So it just helps to go home and reheat food that I know is good for me rather than just eating out all the time.”

For education freshman Kaylyn Kieschnick, living off campus means she cooks for herself rather than eating at dining halls. Growing up with a family that loves to cook at home, Kieschnick said it taught her the importance of eating real ingredients. Helping her family with meals since middle school equipped her with the tools to cook in college.

“I  would cook a lot for my family before they got home, and I always loved that,” Kieschnick said. “My parents had a Hello Fresh subscription as I was growing up, so pretty much everything just shows up at your door and has instructions. I just followed those instructions a lot, and the more I repeated doing the same things, I learned how to make different meals.”

As a student worker at the A&M vet school and an involved member of the sorority Alpha Chi Omega, Kieschnick said that a busy schedule makes cooking at home more of a challenge. She addressed it by noting that it is all about priorities, but the benefits of eating healthy make it worth it.

“I try to find new recipes that don’t take super long or that I can make a lot of and then keep it for the week,” Kieschnick said. “I have a lot of sensitivities to food as well, and so that makes me kind of have to keep up with meal prepping and all those things. It’s been a little bit harder with school starting … but I do love it.”

Both Miller and Kieschnick agreed that social media has also become an outlet where people go for inspiration when it comes to health and cooking. Miller advises that if someone approaches social media the right way, they can learn quite a lot from educated people or learn about healthy eating on social media platforms. 

“But I do think a good thing about TikTok and social media is that people are out there that are educated and put recipes out there, cheap recipes, and people can learn a lot through those videos.” Miller said.

Miller said that although she feels Tik Tok and social media are not perfect, they are a great resource to keep pushing the health movement and help more people find easy, healthy recipes. She thinks that social media is going to be a huge part in motivating people to eat clean in college.

“I think that’s a positive thing if that’s if people are wanting to better their health, there’s doctors on there [social media] and a lot of certified people that give out really good information,” Miller said. “So as long as people are willing to get the knowledge, then they can get those skills. It’s super, super simple.”