There’s nothing junior about these Bellmore-Merrick scientists

For her senior thesis as part of Kennedy High School’s Authentic Science Research Program, 17-year-old Brittany Mascaro of Merrick wanted to answer what one would have thought would be an obvious question, but one which no one had apparently thought to research.

What if, Mascaro wondered, she put cartoon characters on fruits and vegetables and marketed them to young children the same way that sugarcoated cereals and chocolate-chip cookies are? Would kids eat more healthy snacks?

And so, for two summers, Mascaro gathered 16 children at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan and split them into two groups, one of which was fed fruits and vegetables packaged with cartoon labels, and the other of which received healthy snacks without stickers. As it turned out, Mascaro said, the children who were given the healthy snacks with the stickers were “more likely” to eat them, despite the fact that all children taking part in the experiment were given weekly nutrition lessons.

At the end of the experiment, Mascaro calculated the children’s body mass indices. BMI is a measurement of body fat based on height and weight. The scale runs from 18.5, which is considered underweight, to more than 40, which is considered morbidly obese. Mascaro said that children who received the healthy snacks with stickers reduced their BMI’s by .26 during the experiment.

So, fruit and vegetable marketers –– take note!

Mascaro, who is a member of three honor societies at Kennedy and will major in psychology at the University of Michigan in the fall, was recently named a semifinalist at the Long Island Junior Science and Humanities Symposium at Stony Brook University. She was one of three Kennedy seniors to earn the honor. The others are Luke Massaro, Kennedy’s salutatorian, and Samantha Asofsky.

The Junior Science and Humanities Symposium, sponsored by the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force, and administered by Academy of Applied Science, “promotes original research and experimentation in the sciences, engineering, and mathematics at the high school level and publicly recognizes students for outstanding achievement.”

Here’s a look at the research projects of Massaro and Asofsky:

Luke Massaro