
Cooking Oil Saturated Fat and the Iodine Test
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Which cooking oil in your kitchen has the most saturated fat? You can find out with iodine and a stopwatch. Iodine reacts with unsaturated fats and loses its purple color. The faster the color disappears, the more unsaturated fat the oil contains.
You add three drops of iodine to test tubes filled with five different oils: peanut, canola, corn, soya bean, and olive. Then you time how long the purple color takes to clear.
Peanut oil takes the longest at 38 seconds. Canola oil clears in just 12 seconds. The clearing time lines up with each oil's known saturated fat percentage.
Hypothesis
The hypothesis is that peanut oil will have the highest proportion of saturated fat, and when the iodine test is performed, will require the longest time to lose its purple color.
Method & Materials
You will clean the test tubes, label them according to the oils used for testing, measure 20ml of each type of oil, and drip 3 drops of iodine into the first test tube. Start the stopwatch immediately and record the time taken for the purple color of the iodine to disappear.
You will need 1 bottle of peanut oil, 1 bottle of canola oil, 1 bottle of corn oil, 1 bottle of soya bean oil, 1 bottle of olive oil, 5 test tubes, 1 test tube stand, 1 eyedropper, 1 bottle of iodine, 1 stopwatch, and 1 measuring cylinder.
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See what’s includedResults
The results showed that the iodine and peanut oil mixture took the longest to revert to the original color, while the canola oil took the shortest amount of time. The hypothesis was proven to be true, as peanut oil has the highest saturated fat content and the lowest proportion of unsaturated fat among the 5 types of cooking oil tested.
Why do this project?
This science project is interesting because it shows how different types of cooking oil can affect our health. It also demonstrates how the iodine test can be used to measure the amount of saturated fat in different types of oil.
Also Consider
Variations of this experiment could include testing different types of oils like oil palm, coconut oil or sunflower oil. Another variation could be to measure the amount of iodine required for all the unsaturated fat in the oil to react.
Full project details
Additional information and source material for this project are available below.Related videos
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