Could a Cute Package Make Kids Eat More Healthy Food?

Overview

Objectives/Goals For my science fair I wanted to test how I could make kids eat more healthy foods. My objective was to determine if children would eat more healthy food if it were packaged in a colorful and appealing way. Methods/Materials I choose to experiment on two first grade classes, both with 36 children aged 6 or 7. I decorated 36 bags in a cute and colorful way that I thought would appeal to both boys and girls. I used 36 similar bags that were plain brown for the control class. I distributed five similar sized carrots in each of the bags. I wrote a speech telling the kids to eat as many carrots as they liked or to not eat any at all, and to save any uneaten carrots. I went to one class and my friends went to another class and we gave the children the same speech at the same time on the same day. We gave the children ten minutes to eat the carrots and then I collected the bag and counted how many carrots were eaten by each class. Results I determined that the class with the decorated bags ate 75.6 percent of the carrots and the control class ate 50.2 percent of their carrots, which means that the decorations on the bags resulted in the class eating 25.4 percent more carrots. Conclusions/Discussion I concluded that changing the packaging can have an affect on how much food a child consumes. I found that former research showed that children choose food in more appealing packages but I showed that they eat more of the food too.

Awards (1)

• Honorable Mention

Competition history

• CSEF 2008 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry J0302

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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