MY CONCLUSION

The hypothesis of my study is that I believe that vitamin C would be found only in the fruit and vegetable groups. I made this choice because in my research I learned that vitamin C is found in fruit and vegetable sources.

Based upon my experiment I cannot conclude that my hypothesis is correct, because I found vitamin C in eggs and peanut butter. When I compared my results to facts in my research, vitamin C was not supposed to be in these two items. I did not have the experience to make an adequate conclusion, so I consulted with Owen Fonorrow, Director of the vitamin C foundation, (www.vitamincfoundation.org) with my questions. After consulting with Mr. Fonorrow, I have concluded that the test to determine which food groups contain vitamin C is an extremely sensitive test to the presence of vitamin C; however, I cannot rule out that the test could have been sensitive to another acidic vitamin found in the eggs and peanut butter. It is possible that the test detected the minute amount of vitamin C that could exist in both eggs and peanut butter. I have ruled out the possibility that the test is a false positive. I came to this conclusion because my control group (water) did not report vitamin C as being present.

I believe that my experiment is important because it is important to eat foods that contain vitamin C. Our body uses Vitamin C immediately, but our body does not make any of its own vitmain C. So you can see, it is very important that we choose our foods carefully and that we do not consume a diet of just junk food.

In assessing my study design, I have found a strength of this test to be that it is extremely sensitive to the presence of Vitamin C, and a weakness that it may indicate the presence of substances other than just vitamin C. I am planning to continue this experiment to determine what other substances my test solution detects besides vitamin C, in order to understand why a positive result was found in eggs and peanut butter.