Paleo Diet and Paleolithic Diet Questions & Answers

Question

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Well, maybe this is a silly question:

There are a lot of quantifiable properties we sometimes like to watch in a food, like how many grams of carbs, protein or fat there is, how much omega 3/6, how mg of vitamins, minerals or other micronutrients certain food contains, etc.

Now, I was thinking, if some of those properties can be measured at home with some basic (and cheap) chemistry equipment. Like for example, I could measure how much fructose certain apple sort contains, or how much omega 3 is there in some oil. My knowledge of chemistry is rather limited, so I'd like to ask some chemist here if something like this is even possible - just for fun of it, or to learn a bit.

flag	asked Sep 19 2011 at 19:35 greyman 1,411●1●9

I bet there's an untapped market for products that do exactly what you're talking about. – sam Sep 19 2011 at 22:50

FED at LiveCaveman.com · Answer 1 · 2011-09-19 20:21:25Z UTC

With minimal equipment, you can test the following properties...

Sproinginess: pinch food with your fingers and see how much it "sproings" back. For example, raw eggs have a sproinginess of "O".
Chewability: place a piece of food into your mouth and asses it's ability to be chewed completely. Celery and game meats are both low scoring foods while bone marrow scores very high.
The F Factor: How readily you can "F-up" a given food. Fresh fruit generally scores low while high-scoring foods such as meringues and souffles are easy to "F-up".

Olivia · Answer 2 · 2011-09-19 19:45:01Z UTC

Depends, do you consider, say, a centrifuge to be amateur equipment?

Seriously, beyond very basic and elementary school level type experiments (like burning a piece of food over a flask of water and measuring how much the water heats up to provide a ridiculously inaccurate estimate of the energy content of the food) I am having trouble thinking of anything you could easily do at home that would actually be informative. But I'm not a chemist, I'm a lowly agroecology student, so maybe someone else has ideas.

Kaz · Answer 3 · 2011-09-19 22:36:46Z UTC

There are many websites online that will show you how to make a calorimeter with simple ingredients like a tin or aluminum can, paper clips, and cork.

Here's a couple of examples:

http://www.ehow.com/how_4893595_make-simple-calorimeter.html

http://www.ehow.com/how_7603684_make-precise-calorimeter.html

http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_ideas/FoodSci_p012.shtml

There's also a ton of them on youtube, if a visual description is more helpful. :)

Matt · Answer 4 · 2011-09-19 22:43:08Z UTC

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Unless you've got a GC/MS sitting around your kitchen, doing things like analyzing oils for omegas is going to be impossible. Even then you're going to need a huge amount of equipment just to prepare samples. In short, no, it's simply not feasible. For what it's worth, I'm a chemist.

answered Sep 19 2011 at 22:43

Matt
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Got the thingy right next to my NMR ;) – NotPaleoMark Sep 20 2011 at 9:50

Which food properties can be measured with amateur equipment?

4 Answers