How Much Fat is in Your Milk?

1. How Much Fat is in Your Milk?

2. Objectives • Describe why fat is important to our daily diet with no errors. • Assess the fat content in different types of milk using food coloring in a laboratory setting. • Compare how much fat content is in the milk using an educated guess and compare the findings on a chart.

3. Fat- Good or Bad? • Fat provides energy • Prevents essential fatty acid deficiency. • Needed so your body can absorb the fat-soluble vitamins A, S, E, K. • Provides flavor and texture to help prevent food from being blank and dry.

4. Whole Milk • Must contain at least 3.25% milk fat and 8.25% milk solids by weight- which means it derives about 50% of its calories from fat. • Whole milk is meant to be served to infants and young children up to 2 years old.

5. Skim Milk • This milk has as much fat removed as possible. • Cannot contain more than 0.5% milk fat by weight. • Deriving just 5% of its calories from fat. • Best choice for adults. • Only type that should be consumed by people on strict-low fat diets.

6. Cream • 36% fat content • Commonly called heavy whippin cream. • Contains about 52 calories and 6 grams of fat per tablespoon. • Not used for drinking but used mostly in cooking.

7. Your Lab Activity • Using food coloring we are going to determine the fat content in different types of milk by how fast the food color moves through the milk in the bowls.

8. What did you find? • Skim Milk: the food coloring should spread quickly and become faint in color. • Cream: The color will not spread as fast or the color will not fade as fast as in the skim milk. • Whole Milk Should behave somewhere in between. The food coloring is water based and will travel and diffuse better through the water medium than through the fat. So in skim milk, which has a very low fat content and is predominantly water, the food coloring spreads rapidly, whereas in cream the food coloring will take longer to disperse since there is less water for it to travel through.