A perhaps novel explanation on why Americans are "fat"
A lot of us look at the back of a packaged material within the nutritional value content data section to get an impression of just how destructive or healthy a particular product is going to be if it is to be consumed. However, the data is in percent of daily value, a little more analysis is required to get a notion of exactly 'what' the product actually is.
For instance, a sample cheese package of the Walmart brand, Feather Shredded Colby and Monterey Jack has a number close to 10%-20% associated with the fat as that pertains to the daily value. The nominal fat in grams per a 28 gram serving is 9 grams, this basically means that the percent in mass that is of fat is 32.14 %. Water constitutes most of what's in the cheese. The serving portion, in this case 28 grams of cheese, can be modified to create the effect of a smile on a customer while he or she is loading the product on to the cart as opposed to throwing it on the product counter in disgust. Yet, most of us probably know just how much of a lard portion we're getting when eating cheese, unless it's low fat cheese.
How accurate is the Babcock fat test, or rather, how skilled am I in producing reliable results through this method? Further statistical analysis may be provided later. For those of you who aren't familiar with the methodology the following site does a nice job of explaining the history behind it as well as the protocols
http://www.bookrags.com/Babcock_test
The result in percent composition by mass of 9 samples was
Sample #1
30%,31%,31%
Sample #2
32%,31%,32%
Sample #3
34%,32%,34%
A sample of cheese (sample #1) was taken out of the bag and then placed in a grinder so that the shredded cheese became powdery. The total mass was divided by 3.1 and three equal amounts of cheese became the representative samples for the Babcock fat test. Two other samples of cheese in equal mass as that of sample #1 was taken from the product bag and 6 new representative samples were prepared for the Babcock fat test. All solutions were of reagent grade (email me at gcttutor@yahoo.com) if one desires some of the additional details for this experiment.
The average fat composition of all nine representative samples is then 31.89% which is pretty close to the nominal value. I'm going to need to do some further statistical analysis on this data, the results shall be posted....perhaps tommorrow.
