Referenced from lesson Randomness and Sample Size

The Issue

Childhood obesity is a major problem in the U.S. Many have called for food producers to provide consumers with nutritional information so that consumers can make wiser choices. This raises some interesting questions:

  1. What is my snacking pattern?

  2. How good am I at rating the healthiness of my snack?

  3. Do I tend to eat healthy? How do I compare to my class? How does my class compare to the rest of the country?

  4. Does knowing nutritional information about my snacks help me change my habits?

Objectives

Upon completing this project, you will have the enduring understanding that interpreting graphs provides useful information regarding the data graphed. You will compare yourself and our class to the U.S. population to find whether your snacking habits are similar in some ways and different in other ways.

Motivation

Search “What do Americans eat for snack?” to find graphs related to eating habits. You will use this to compare to your data.

Guiding Questions:

  1. What time of day do we eat the healthiest snacks?

  2. We know that snacks high in saturated fats are bad for you. Do high-fat snacks get unhealthy ratings? In general, how good would you say you are, as a class, at judging healthiness?

  3. When did you snack? How does this compare to the rest of the class?

  4. Typically, how healthy were your snacks? How does this compare to the class as a whole?

  5. IF saturated fat is bad for you, do snacks with high salt content also seem to have high fat? Is high fat associated with high calories? Are there any other associations you can spot?

Produce

You will create a slide show / presentation where you answer a statistical question based on the data collected. Your presentation must include your question, plots, data, tables, photos, and paragraphs answering your question based on data collected. Include comparing your data to others in America as part of your reporting. Include the following about your data collection: What made it hard? Does this affect the quality of data? What sort of snacks are you more likely to not enter?

Survey Details

Create a Google Form with the following questions:

  • Date

  • Time

  • What’s the name of your snack?

  • Is your snack salty or sweet?

  • How many servings did you eat?

  • How many calories per serving?

  • How many grams of total fat per serving?

  • How many milligrams of sodium per serving?

  • How many grams of sugar per serving?

  • How much does this snack cost?

  • How many ingredients are in this snack?

  • In 1 word, why you are eating this snack?

  • How healthy do you think the snack is? (1=very unhealthy; 5=very healthy)

Fill out this form every time you eat a snack for five days.

 

 

Once you have all of your data and look at several graphics on-line about America’s snacking habits, you will declare your statistical question for this project.

 

 

Declare the statistical question you will report on here:

(Based on the Food Habits project from IDS at UCLA)

These materials were developed partly through support of the National Science Foundation, (awards 1042210, 1535276, 1648684, and 1738598). CCbadge Bootstrap:Data Science by Emmanuel Schanzer, Nancy Pfenning, Emma Youndtsmith, Jennifer Poole, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Joe Politz, Ben Lerner, Flannery Denny, and Dorai Sitaram with help from Eric Allatta and Joy Straub is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.BootstrapWorld.org. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available by contacting schanzer@BootstrapWorld.org.