In this experiment, I learned the process that is used to measure how much energy is in different foods. Nuts are a natural energy filled snack. They contain a lot of energy or calories. We hear every day people talking about eating too many calories, but I didn't know exactly what that meant. What does it mean to eat too many calories? But in the case of nuts, if one nut has 4 calories, and someone eats 30 nuts, they just had 120 calories. This is considered a healthy amount. However, if someone eats 100 nuts, then that's 400 calories, and that can be too much.
I found that the nuts also have a lot of oils in them. When I burned the nuts, the nuts became black and hard, but they had drops of oil that were burning drop into the dish they were in. I know that peanut oil and almond oil are used in cooking and foods and these are healthy types of oils. I also know that peanut butter is a healthy snack made from peanuts and peanut oil. I like peanut butter. It tastes really good with jelly.
Some of the nuts were larger in size than the other nuts. However, this did not mean longer burning time as they burned out approximately as fast as other nuts. It is therefore difficult to tell from the size or portion of the nut just by looking at it. The Brazil nut is the largest of the nuts I tested, but it was the 3rd highest in calories. The pecan is not as large yet produced more heat and had more calories than the brazil nut. The almond is about the same size as the cashew, but had on average more heat produced. I thought that the larger the nut, the longer it would burn and the more energy it would produce, but this is not the case at all. This is important because sometimes someone can eat a smaller portion, but if the food is high in calories, it will not be better than eating larger portions of foods lower in calories.
In real life, calories are measured in a machine called a calorimeter. This is a sealed