Lab day 3: Testing ham's starch

We did an experiment to test how much starch three different pieces of ham had. Starch is a type of carbohydrate that is stored for a long time in our bodies. It is in food such as potatoes or bread. Ham isn´t supposed to have starch, only protein.

To test how much starch the ham has we used iodine (it is contained in betadine) and poured it on the ham. When iodine is mixed with starch, it turns black. The blacker the ham turns, the more starch it contains.

These are the three pieces of ham after applying the iodine. I am going to number them  from left to right from one to three in order to be able to talk about them. The first piece of ham came inside this package and this is the nutritional information on the package:

As you can see in this package, the ingredients don´t contain any potatoes or anything which is composed of starch. This is why the piece of ham didn´t turn black.

These are the photos of the package and the information of the second piece of ham.

As you can see, this piece of ham doesn´t have any starch either, this is the reason why it hasn´t turned black either. This means these two hams are high in quality because they only contain meat, no other components such as potatoes.

This is the last piece of ham, number 3. These are the photos of this piece:

This is the only piece of ham that contains potato so it contains starch. It is the one that has the least percentage of ham as it is mixed with potatoes. Due to this, it is also the piece that makes you fatter, as it contains more fat.

Doing this experiment, we learnt how to test the quantity of starch in the food.