Focus at Four: Food might just be the secret to a 4.0
BRYAN, Texas (KBTX) – People always say, you are what you eat. But what if your eating habits and knowledge of food would not only make you healthier, but smarter too?
Erin Batta, a senior statistic major at Texas A&M University, is one of the researchers behind a project that looks into whether that could be the case.
Batta said that the research was based on students in the First Year Eats program at Texas A&M.
“Their goal is to provide food and cooking lessons to freshmen,” she said, “They’re trying to help people be trained on not just eating enough, but eating healthy food.”
The data was primarily done by compiling GPAs for the semester after students had left the FYE program.
“That’s the revolutionary part of this project. They weren’t even in the program anymore and we took their grades from the semester afterward and found that they were still getting a statistically significant difference compared to the GPAs of students who were in a similar situation but weren’t in the program,” said Batta.
She said that this project wasn’t her brainchild, but she was able to come up with a new research question for the project.
“I was reached out to by my professor, Dr. Alan Dabney, and they had been doing this project for a couple of years, and they were looking for the next student to take it over,” said Batta.
You can read Batta’s thesis here.
You can watch the full interview in the video player above.
