Westfield class puts Oreos to the test in Algonquin

What ever happened to those Oreo commercials that used to run when I was a kid?

Here's how a typical Oreo ad from the early '90s would play out: Two boys would be hanging out after school in the gymnasium, resting while watching a cute girl playing basketball.

The girl would shoot a flirty look in the direction of the two boys, who, after being paralyzed momentarily by the girl's gaze, would start arguing over which one of them was the object of the girl's affections.

While all this excitement was going on, the boys would be munching on Oreos.

And then the solution to their problem would present itself to them in the form of a thin layer of vanilla cream sandwiched between two chocolate wafers.

The boys would look at each other as if they had just stumbled across Schrödinger's equation.

Each of them would hold onto one side of a single Oreo. Then, they would twist the wafers apart, hoping to get the wafer with more cream on it.

Inevitably, the two wafers would have an equal amount of cream on them. The commercial would end with the two boys looking at each other, eyebrows raised, their hopes still alive, despite the lingering uncertainty.

I was reminded of this commercial when I got a call last week from a seventh-grader at Westfield Community School in Algonquin.

Jake Kloiber from Algonquin told me about an experiment that I'm sure has been done countless times.

Kloiber's seventh-grade science class tested the hypothesis that Double Stuf Oreos don't actually have double the cream filling in regular old Oreos.

The setup was pretty simple.

"We carefully scraped off the filling of five regular and five double Oreos, and we weighed it," he said.

The class used supersensitive electronic scales that could register small differences in mass.

The hypothesis proved correct.

"They fell short by a pretty decent amount," Kloiber said.

Before you complain to Nabisco, consider this: The research on Double Stuf Oreos is a mixed bag.

I found one study by an advanced placement statistics class at Wissahickon High School in Ambler, Pa., that contradicts the findings of Kloiber's classmates.

According to this study, Double Stuf Oreos have more than twice as much vanilla cream than regular Oreos. The sample size was much larger in this study: 72 cookies of each type.

Mr. Jacoby's second-grade classroom in Arlington, Mass. did an interesting version of the experiment in 2003.

They started by polling students and parents on which bag of Oreos they expected to have more cream.

Almost all the students said the Double Stuf bag would have more, while the more-cynical parents were split between the Double Stuf and regular bag.

The experiment bore out the children's prediction: "In answering the project question, 'Is Double Stuf worth the stuff?' our answer is an overwhelming yes!"

So, did some of the Oreo cream get "lost" during the Westfield experiment, or has Nabisco skimped on the filling in its Double Stuf Oreos since 2003?

You decide.