The energy that keeps yout brain and your body going comes from the food you eat . Your digestive system and the cells in your body break down the food and gradually oxidize the resulting molecules in a series of chemical reactions to release energy that your cells can use and store. In this lab we have learnt a method for measuring how much chemical energy is stored in different types of food and we expressed our results in Calories.

To measure the chemical Energy stored in food, we oxidized the food much more faster than the cells in your body do, by burning it in air. The basic idea of a calorimetre is to release all the stored energy at once and capture all the released energy with a reservoir of water. Measuring the temperature of the water at the beginning and at the end of the trial allowed us to calculate the energy absorbed by the water. All this energy comes from the chemical reaction.

Here you can watch our experiments: