Vermont students take up healthy lifestyle options

BURLINGTON, Vermont - Pledges by college students to eschew drugs and alcohol are old hat. Now they are meditating, working out, practicing yoga, eating healthily, and at least in one school, the University of Vermont, it has become a bona fide lifestyle.

In UVM's Wellness Environment, known as WE, students live in a new, big substance-free dorm, take a required class in what affects the health of their brains and bodies, and are given incentives to stay healthy like access to a free gym membership, nutrition and fitness coaches and an app that tracks their activities.

"We created an environment where we believe if we offer young people healthy foods, healthy choices, they'll make them. We reward those things, and we don't encourage the negative things, so the rule in the environment is no alcohol, no drugs, and the students follow it," says Jim Hudziak, the chief of child psychiatry at the UVM's Larner College of Medicine, who founded the Wellness Environment, or WE program.