Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello, im working on an experiment right now which is due tomorrow, and it is how much fat is in your food, and i cant figure out the fat extraction effieciency of chocolate chips because the directions are to divide the extracted fat percentage by the actual fat percentage and multiply it by 100, but my results come out to be over 200% since my fat extracted % from chocolate chips was significantly higher than the results for the two other foods.

Hi,

I am trying to understand your question so i can help. As I understand the procedure, you extracted the fat from the food, choc chips in this case, and then are supposed to compare your value to the package value for fat content and express the result as a percent. Is that correct?

How efficient the fat extraction was depends on the type of food and how you did the extraction. Maybe some foods take longer to extract fat from than others, or maybe they should be treated in a different way (different temperature, different solvent, etc.). The fact that fat extraction from choc chips was more efficient than from your other foods is OK. Just try to explain why it happened that way.

If you need more help, post again.

Sybee

Hello, im doing an experiment right now which is how much fat is in your food, and it states that i'm supposed to make a table of viscosity of the fats extracted and find the percentage of liqud fat which i don't undertsand how to find. Thank you. https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ?from=Blog

Hi,

Sorry I missed your last post. In answer to your question, I read the instructions in the Procedure section of the project and here is what it says about Viscosity and Percent Liquid Fat:

"In the viscosity column, write down if the fat is a (thick or thin) liquid or a (hard or soft) solid. In the texture column, note down if the fat is oily, sticky, waxy, soft, etcetera. You might find that some of your samples are a mixture of solid and liquid fats. In the last column of your table, write down an estimate of how much (in percent) of the total fat in your jar is liquid."

This is not a quantitative measurement. You are expected to observe the residue in the jars and record how thin or thick it is and if there is some solid fat. The estimated percent solid is not exact. The idea is to see if the food contains both a type of fat that is liquid at room temperature, like oil, or one that is solid like butter or lard.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you need more help.

Sybee