Do People Accurately Count Their Calories?

Question~ Do people accurately measure the amount of calories they consume?

Hypothesis~ I hypothesized that people would not accurately guess the amount of calories in each snack because it would then explain the common obesity in the human race today.

Procedure~ Step 1: Gather snacks for testing.

Step 2: Figure out serving size and the amount of calories for each serving.

Step 3: Gather permission from people for testing.

Step 4: Ask each participant how many calories they think each snack holds.

Step 5: Find the average of all guesses for each snack, then compare to the real amount of calories.

Data~

Participants

Abstract~

Tracking Your Diet

Do People Accurately Count Their Calories?

Julia Sorensen

For my experiment, I have chosen to find out if people can accurately count their calories. I hypothesized that people are not very accurate at this skill because a great percentage of our population is overweight. This could be due to not properly counting their calories. Restaurants, storemade and homemade foods usually do not label their foods with the amount of calories that are in them, so it is a difficult task for some to be aware of how much they’re really eating.

To complete this experiment, I first chose three snacks that people typically eat. These included Ritz crackers, a Tastykake krimpet, and Doritos. Next, I chose the serving size of each snack and checked how many calories each one was. Five Ritz crackers were equivalent to 70 calories, eleven Doritos were equivalent to 140 calories, and a package of Tastykakes were equivalent to 310 calories. Moreover, the next step in my experiment was to gather permission from various aged people for testing. I then asked every person how many calories they thought each snack was.

The people who were asked to participate in my experiment actually did not guess that far off. The worst guess was that a Tastykake package was 600 calories, while it was actually only 310. The most on-target guess was when a test subject predicted the 11 Doritos were 140 calories, and they really were. The average guess for Doritos was 117 calories. This was 16.7% lower than the actual amount of calories in 11 Doritos. Furthermore, the average guess of calories for a Tastykake package was 288, which was 7.1% lower than the real amount. For five Ritz crackers, the average guess was 119 calories. This was 70% higher than the real amount of calories in five Ritz, which is 70. Overall, every guess was realistic and did not exceed 600 calories.

By doing this project, I learned that calorie counting is a very important topic. It is a very crucial part in staying healthy. My hypothesis was partly correct because only one guess was on target, but the others weren’t far off. A possible source of error could be that since the people in my experiment were not overweight, they already had a good notion of counting their calories. It was actually better when participants guessed over the factual amount of calories in a snack because then they’d eat less of that food. Overall, according to my data most people are not too shabby at counting their calories.