imastudent615 wrote:Hmm...yeah that does make sense; but here's what i'm thinking (why this makes sense; but maybe i'm just grasping at straws); the IV- is the different foods within the food group; DV= amount of calories; the constant is the amount of servings (as well as calorimeter, etc). I'm going for having 2 different menus for a day with completely (or as close as possibe) different food and finding whether or not they would be close (not the exact difference) so wouldn't it be more or less the same- either the calories are close or they are far apart because there will be a wide variety of different foods in the menus. Does that make any sense?
to answer your questions- I'm in 10th grade; in 8th grade I took Life Science; 9th was biology; and this year in chemistry.
I'll ask my science teacher tomorrow what he thinks.
The problem is your experiment does not actually test your hypothesis, since your selection of meals is not representative of the food pyramid. With six meals worth of food, you cannot really test a wide variety of foods; there are millions of food and your meals may have 10 items each if you really try hard. Your conclusion can only be that the 2 sets you tested are similar or not similar; you cannot conclude anything about the food pyramid in general. I'll ask around and see if any other experts have some ideas.
Are you interested in the calorimetry project specifically, or nuitrition in general? If you like calorimetry, you could change your hypothesis and keep the same project. [Just a note, the calorimetry project is rated a '7' on the difficultly scale- this may be a little easy for a 10th grader as written]
There are a couple of cool nuitrition related projects.
I like the vitamin C project:
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentorin ... ?from=Home
You don't have to use this hypothesis, you could compare vitamin C across different juices, or in different multivitamins, or in the same juice stored different ways. Students on this forum have also done other titrations for different anti-oxidants, but these tend to require more complicated chemicals and equipment. Since you are taking chemistry, your teacher might be able to help you with obtaining chemicals. (For example, one student examined the different levels of anti-oxidants in tea with and with out milk added).
I found this abstract of a project on the web. It sounded pretty interesting:
http://scssi.scetv.org/mims/schools/blh ... charl1.htm
Does any of this sound good?
Louise