Every Thursday, TriangleMom2Mom features different ways to play with your kids.

Today, Kate DeAlmeida, Investigate Health! Lab Facilitator at the Museum of Life and Science, writes about the fat in foods.

As a parent, it's important to develop healthy approaches that will benefit your child's nutritional needs, physical activity and emotional well-being. Nudging your children at an early age to connect with how their own behavior and choices affect their overall health will go a long way toward developing good habits later in life.

At the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, a brand new laboratory known as the Investigate Health! Lab offers interactive experiments children and their parents can do that address important features of children's health. From the affects of calories, to the purity of water, to understanding how the heart works, these experiments demonstrate fundamental scientific principles that promote healthy minds, bodies and spirit.

The lab experiments change on a daily basis, offering new topics every time you visit. Rotating topics include Counting Calories, Extracting Iron from Cereal, Sugary Snack Challenge, Testing Water Filters and Testing Reaction Times.

Here's a simple experiment you can do at home in the kitchen with your child to test the fat content of foods by simply rubbing them on a piece of brown paper. If the food leaves a translucent spot, then you'll know that it contains fat.

Testing Foods for Fat

Background
There are three macronutrients humans need: Proteins, carbohydrates and fats. Our bodies need some fat and cholesterol to work properly, but many people have no idea how much is enough or too much. It turns out that eating "good" fats and avoiding "bad" fats is far more important than keeping track of your total fat intake.

There are two kinds of fat: Saturated and unsaturated. Saturated fats are not healthy. Sources are butter, red meat, chicken fat, lard, palm oil, coconut oil, cheese, eggs and milk. Unsaturated fats are much healthier. Examples are olive oil and peanut oil (both monounsaturated fats) and corn oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil and soybean oil (all polyunsaturated fats).

Fat Experiment
What you need:
Many small pieces (2" x 2") of light-weight brown craft paper (brown lunch bags work great)
Markers
Foods such as avocado, cut almonds, potato chips, marshmallows, raw potato, tortilla chips, sugar, crackers, olives, apples, butter and margarine

What you do:
Write the name of the food to be tested on the bottom of a piece of brown paper.
Make a guess as to whether that food has fat in it or not.
Fold a piece of the food into the paper and squeeze. If the food is a nut, make sure you rub the cut surface on the paper and that you rub pretty hard. A rolling pin can help to really crush the nut.
If the food item is especially wet (for example, apples or raw potatoes) then you will have to wait for the paper to dry before you make your conclusion. A hair dryer can help speed up the process.

Go here for more information about the museum's Investigate Health! Lab, exhibits, events and programs.