Lunch
Crunch:
Can
Nutritious
Be
Affordable
and
Delicious?
Team
#
3421
Team # 3421 Page 2 of 20
Summary
Obesity is one of the most pertinent issues faced in the United States, and by
extension its schools, today. Children who are overweight face a much greater risk of
becoming obese adults. Many believe that it is necessary to promote healthy eating habits
and offer healthy school lunches during high school to prevent obesity in the future.
However, students do not like the taste of these meals, and believe them to be far less
filling. Schools are worried about the cost of more expensive healthy food without
enough demand for them. It is very important that we encourage high school students to
eat healthier meals at school, while still appealing to their tastes.
Our consulting firm was told to develop a mathematical model that would yield
an appropriate amount of the required caloric intake during lunch for a student with
distinct individual attributes. In order to begin this investigation, we determined that the
factors that were to be tested as independent variables were weight, height, and amount of
regular physical activity. We decided that eating breakfast in the morning does not affect
the amount of calories needed during lunch, according to a study conducted by David
Levitsky of Cornell University. We used a constant age of sixteen years for all the data
collected. We used a relationship to turn data regarding height, weight, and physical
activity into the amount of energy required by students daily. We used this information
to come up with the amount of calories required from lunch. It was revealed that calorie
requirements drastically increased as physical activity increased with those belonging to
higher percentiles requiring more calories.
The next logical task would be to display the effect of each factor individually.
We utilized normal...