Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

This is my 4th year participating in the science fair and i'm wanting to bring my project to the next level. Last year my project was on Omega 3's so I researched it's cardiovascular benefits, benefits with ADHD and also alzheimer's disease. With an omega 3 index test I tested two people's index over a period of 6 weeks resulting while supplementing fish oil. One person had a surprisingly high increase, but the other not so much. My conclusion was that the absorption of the omega 3 was different due to a difference in the meal they consumed while taking the supplement. My question is how do I continue my project from last year. This is a really neat and interesting topic and I really do want to take it to the next level, although I can't seem to wrap my head around it. Any ideas?

Hi there! This sounds like a very important and interesting topic to continue your research on!

I have a few suggestions for how you could build on the project you started last year:

1) Last year, you only had one group, people taking a fish oil supplement. It's extremely important that you have a second, control group that isn't taking the supplement to compare with the group that is taking the supplement. Without the control group for comparison, you don't know what is a "normal" or baseline level of fluctuation in omega-3 index.

2) Testing the responses of two people is good, but it's quite a small number. This makes it difficult to interpret the meaning of your interesting result that one person responded much more strongly than the other. If at all possible, you should try to test a larger number of people to build on your initial findings.

3) You mention that you think a reason for the difference in responses between your two test subjects is that they consumed different types of diet during the study. This is an interesting hypothesis that you could explore. To the extent possible, it would be good to control for this by instructing your test subjects to stick to a similar type of diet. That would help you determine the extent to which diet is (or isn't) contributing to the effect of the fish oil supplement on subjects' omega-3 index. (Try looking up the effects of different diets on omega-3 index to see if a particular type of diet would be more interesting or relevant to this project.) If you have enough participants, you could even split them into four groups: [Control diet, no supplement], [Diet of interest, no supplement], [Control diet + supplement], [Diet of interest + supplement]. This could really help give you a sense of what impact diet may or may not have on the effect of fish oil supplements.

Hope this helps, and good luck!