Calories in Food 11B

You know it's a good day when you get to set fire to a cheese puff.

In today's lab, Ameera and I got to enflame several everyday food items, including a pecan, a cashew, and a cheese puff. The goal of this was to figure out how much energy was released by the food sample, and then use this data to determine how many Calories are in each sample. Some tools we used to aid us in this determination were a calorimeter, a thermometer, a beaker, some water to help measure, and a flame.

Here is the Calorimeter in which we burned the food. Notice the beaker on top filled with water that we used to measure the heat released by the sample.

Poor Cheeto.

after!

before....

Questions --

1. We measured a temperature change in the water.
2. We measured the energy released by the food sample.
3. A small amount of energy is released in the form of smoke through the holes in the calorimeter.
4. I was surprised that the pecan had the most Calories and the Cheeto had the least Calories, because Cheetos are generally looked at as really unhealthy, so i thought they would contain the most Calories.