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Unit 1 Calorie Research Paper

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In recent years, more and more people have become conscious about what they eat. Specifically, becoming aware of what is in what they eat or how much of something is in their food. From a young age children are being taught more thoroughly about what a balanced diet should consist of. It has become common knowledge that our diets should contain all the essential components such as protein, fats, sugars, salts, vitamins, and carbohydrates to name a few. And that on average some components are needed in higher quantities than others, although these amounts needed, vary on the individual. The same goes for the intake of calories you consume per day. In today’s day and age, a nutrition facts label is present on the back of nearly all the food we …show more content…

When most people think about the term ‘calorie’ they are actually talking about what nutritionists call a ‘kilocalorie’. 1 calorie is the amount of energy it takes to heat 1kg of water by 1 °C at sea level. The calorie content of food was first determined in the late 1800s by the chemist Wilbert. O. Atwater. He built a device called a respiration calorimeter, to make direct measurements of heat released by humans, from the food they consumed. At 4ft x 8ft, Atwater’s calorimeter was big enough to step in to it, it measured the amount heat they released, the amount of oxygen they consumed and the amount of carbon dioxide they gave off. Using this device he way able to measure Atwater was able to measure the precise amount of energy contained in thousands of food items. He found that carbohydrate and protein were worth about 4 calories per gram and fats, about 9 calories per gram. This 4-9-4 rule is at the heart of how labels are determined per …show more content…

This is the method that has been used for over 100 years, but it is very slow and complicated. A new method uses a technique called nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to measure fat. It works by bombarding a food sample with a radio-frequency pulse. This causes the magnetic moments of the protons in each of the samples atoms to flip. After the pulse ends, the protons magnetic moments flip back, but since they flip back a bit slower in fat, their signal can be separated from the rest of the signals and the amount of fat can be

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