How to determine amount of nutrition in a vegetable?!
How to determine amount of nutrition in a vegetable?
How do you determine nutrition in a vegetable for a high skool science fair project? Additional Details
1 day ago
by acctualy experimenting not just reasearching
1 day ago
any thought on refinement are welcome
1 day ago
what about zinc?
Answers: 1 day ago
by acctualy experimenting not just reasearching1 day ago
any thought on refinement are welcome1 day ago
what about zinc? My that's a *big* question you just asked<g>! Here's what the FAO has to say about analyzing food:
http://www.fao.org/docrep/006/y5022e/y50...
How heavily into science are you? Assuming you aren't planning on a science career here's a relatively simple experiment you could perform to test for fat content. For the sake of easiness you might want to do this with high-fat things like avocado<g>.
Simply puree a known quantity of a food in a large amount of water. The fat will float to the surface so you can measure the amount of fat you skim off the top of the water.An example might be that you puree 100grams of avocado and recover 20 grams of fat from the top of the water. Ergo; 20 grams of fat in 100grams of avocado.
Slightly more complex is to measure for calories. You burn a sample of food, measuring how many heat calories you put into the system (to burn the food) and simultaneously measuring total calories of heat that are found in the system. The food calories are the difference between total calories minus input calories. An example would be that you burn 100grams of avocado using 200kilocalories and measure total kilocalories of 350kilocalories. Ergo; 100grams of avocado has 150kilocalories.
Just so you know, those aren't 'official' numbers for avocado.
If you want to win a national science fair you could measure the total cobalt content of avocado and determine what percentage of that cobalt is 'bound' in all the different form of cobalamin. Pull that off and you could write your own ticket to the college of your choice with all expenses paid! '-)
Edit:
Since you asked about zinc whilst I was typing; do you have access to a mass spectrometer? That would be an easy way to determine total zinc levels! Determining how much of that zinc is bio-available is another *much* more complicated subject<g>. Source(s):
In no way should this answer be construed as revealing any trade or industry secrets. By using an internet search engine . . . http://www.nutritiondata.com You can find protocols for estimating various components. You can't do all of them, that would be more like a grad school project. Any particular vitamin or mineral you have in mind? http://www.oph-good-housekeeping.com/veg...