Find out whether, in general, more fat means more calories in food. I am doing this to discover which foods' calories are largely composed of fat, and which foods have many calories, and yet have only a small amount of fat, if any at all.

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Josh Wakeford

Statistics 2: Component 02: Coursework on Bivariate Data

Aim

The aim of this investigation is to find out whether, in general, more fat means more calories in food.  I am doing this to discover which foods’ calories are largely composed of fat, and which foods have many calories, and yet have only a small amount of fat, if any at all.

The results I discover might be especially useful for people who are dieting.  Often people avoid foods with fats in them, and this sort of investigation will help to show what foods are best for this diet.  On the other hand, the information could also be used for people who are on low calorie diets, but that are not especially concerned with the amount of fat they get in their food.

Data Collection

I decided to use a range of 50 foods.  The information source for this data was a book called ‘Calorie Counter’ which is a source with over 1200 foodstuffs’ data recorded.  To obtain the data, I took every 20th result from the book, however, if I got two pieces of data that were of the same food, the only differences being that they were made by different companies or with a specific flavour, I took the next food which I had not used before.  If I had not done this, I would have got many results which would have been remarkably similar.

I thought that the best thing to do in the case of repeated foods was to take the next type of food because this would give me a wider range of foods to study, while keeping the selection of the foods relatively random.  As the foods in the book were in alphabetical order, and in no way ordered by means of numbers of calories or amounts of fat, I assumed that the selection was entirely random with regards to fat content and number of calories.

The other way in which I used foods which weren’t every 20 was when the foodstuff would have been cooked in a specific way to reduce fat, for example, in the case of chicken, where the skin would be removed to reduce the fat content.  If the sample selected was altered in this way, I just looked back and used the food in either its unaltered form, or with the data for the food when it had just been basically cooked.

The other change I made from the data in the book was to change the values Tr, meaning trace, an amount so small it is almost immeasurable.  I therefore changed these values to zero, because they were so close to it that I would not be able to plot the points close enough to the x-axis on the graph, and scale wouldn’t accommodate for these values anyway.

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Modelling Procedures

The first thing I did with the data was to plot a scatter graph of the results.  To do this I used Microsoft Excel 2002 as I felt that it would be able to plot the points more accurately than I could and that it would select a perfect scale for the size of graph that I chose.  Using a computer program also made it easier to manipulate the graph to the right size and shape.

The graph that I did can be seen as a separate page after this one.  What the computer ...

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