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How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)
- alexbock 10y agoThe obvious next question then is how the protein and carbohydrate content is measured. That sounds like it would require more difficult analytical methods than bomb calorimetry and might not be worth the time and expense if it were not for the fact that those need to be reported separately on the label anyway. Brief searching suggests that proteins are measured with a nitrogen content test and fats are determined by mixing the food with a non-polar solvent to see how much dissolves. Carbohydrates seem trickier and I haven't found a great explanation. Water solubility might work once the other components are removed.
- cma 10y agoThe protein test was famously faked with melamine in the Chinese dog-food scandal that killed dogs and resulted in a recall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls
- mysterypie 10y agoI was following that case closely back in 2007 because of my pet (thankfully not affected). An astonishing thing I learned was that practically every brand of cat food and dog food in North America is/was manufactured by a single company called Menu Foods in Streetsville, Ontario, Canada. The pet food "brands" don't have their own factories. They all contract it out to the same place. A few journalists remarked on this secret fact that came out because of the recall. We agonize over which brand is healthier for our cats and dogs, but it's all an illusion. The majority of US and Canadian pet food is made at one factory with the same basic animal ingredients, same quality control, same employees, and the same machines. Maybe they adjust the proportions slightly and tweak the flavors. Then they slap on different labels like Purina, Iams, Royal Canin, whatever. It's saddening to learn that we really don't have as much choice as we think. I'm much more skeptical and questioning than the average person, and yet I assumed that the pet food's "brand name" somehow made a difference.
- bluedino 10y ago>> The majority of US and Canadian pet food is made at one factory This is true if you're talking about wet pet food - there are other makers of wet pet food and dry pet food (which is over half the market) is made by other companies. Mars/Nestle (the same people who make candy...)
- spoofball 10y agothe majority of pet food is meat not fit for human consumption. [1] if you aren't feeding your pet meat that you eat, it's living on extreme crap. [1]: http://www.dogfoodadvisor.com/dog-food-industry-exposed/unfit-for-humans-legal-for-dog-food/ http://www.dogfoodadvisor.com/dog-food-industry-exposed/unfi...
- sukilot 10y agoPeople like fancy food. That doesn't make non-fancy food extreme crap.
- thinkloop 10y ago"not fit for human consumption" is not a synonym for "unfancy". It describes the processes involved to arrive at the final food. Filet mignon can be unfit for human consumption, while pigs' feet can be processed correctly and be fit for consumption.
- thinkloop 10y agoCheck this out: http://www.alive.com/health/fit-for-human-consumption/ http://www.alive.com/health/fit-for-human-consumption/ Animals that are sick or unhealthy are separated from the herd and slaughtered independently, then sold for pet food and livestock feed. This was partly what fostered the mad cow issue. There is higher risk for illness with non-human grade food. If you don't want higher risk for your pet than child, you shouldn't feed the off-the-shelf non-human grade food.
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- Someone 10y agoThe linked-to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal was way more scandalous. When bought in bulk, milk isn’t priced by the liter because it is too easy to water it down. Instead, it is priced by kilograms of protein. Measuring protein is hard, so they measure nitrogen instead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kjeldahl_method#Conversion_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kjeldahl_method#Conversion_fac..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumas_method#Advantages_and_limitations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumas_method#Advantages_and_li...). Melamine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melamine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melamine) is cheap, rich in nitrogen, and, unfortunately, poisonous.
- Scarblac 10y agoThis scandal is the reason Dutch supermarkets still limit the amount of baby formula that can be bought per customer, so many Chinese trying to buy up large amounts that there was a risk many stores would run out.
- germanier 10y agoHong Kong even restricts export of baby formula (and smugglers are regularly arrested on the border to mainland).
- eru 10y agoI always wonder why they don't just order more from the factory and sell to the Chinese? (Or raise prices.) Why don't they want to make more money?
- jacalata 10y agoI don't know if the factories are manufacturing enough, or capable of ramping up to do so. It's a huge increase in demand. I heard of similar problems in Australia.
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- lostlogin 10y agoThe same cheat was used in milk in China in '08. Baby formula was effected and babies died. Many companies were doing it and something like 50,000 babies were hospitalised. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
- z3t4 10y agoConsidering how cheap protein is, you must be the greediest person ever to fake baby formula.
- powertower 10y agoAlso this is interesting... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil
- sukilot 10y agoAre these Chinese companies getting rich, or just getting by? Quality food is expense.
- eru 10y agoThe Chinese government capped prices of milk products in a bid to tame inflation.
- avar 10y agoIsn't the simpler & more plausible explanation that most individual foods aren't measured like that, but rather just by summing up the protein/carbohydrate/fat etc. amounts that go into making the food? E.g. if you're making frozen pizza just add up flour, the pepperoni etc. you put in and divide it by portion size.
- alexbock 10y agoPizza in particular is an interesting example because I would expect leavened bread products to be one of the cases where summing the components would cause more problems than usual (because you're going to lose sugar and other nutrients to the yeast). I'm not sure how many calories worth of carbs yeast consume during normal bread making, but I would expect it to be measurable. When making wine, yeast can easily consume pounds of sugar within days.
- avar 10y agoCouldn't things like yeast be handled by some standard pre-computed approximate lookups?
- alexbock 10y agoDefinitely. You might not even have to consider baking time or temperature to get a good enough number to cover the calorie difference from lost carbohydrates and produced ethanol to meet the level of accuracy required for food labels. I only brought it up in the first place because whenever a simple solution to a complicated problem is put forward, it will inevitably turn out that it's either not general enough or special cases need to be handled to keep it simple. There's nothing wrong with needing special cases, but it's always nicer to figure out what the special cases will be before someone does a bunch of architectural work that hasn't considered them.
- analog31 10y agoI suspect it's not a large effect for bread. My family bakes our own bread, and I would say without having measured it on a scale, that there's not a noticeable loss of weight from one end of the process to the other. Also, you'd notice the stuff bubbling if there were a significant production of CO2. I've also made beer, and it bubbles like crazy once it gets working. One possible difference is that bread is made from (mostly) starch, whereas beermaking converts starches to sugars before fermentation, and the yeasts can work more efficiently on sugars. Of course you can also load up commercial pizza with sugar... one of the reasons why we make our own pizza.
- fcoury 10y agoI found this URL that explains different methods of carbohydrate analysis in food: http://people.umass.edu/~mcclemen/581Carbohydrates.html http://people.umass.edu/~mcclemen/581Carbohydrates.html
- vrc 10y agoI know some smaller brands estimate using the USDA Food Composition Database (https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/), which in turn gets its data under the National Food and Nutrient Analysis Program (http://www.ars.usda.gov/News/docs.htm?docid=9446 http://www.ars.usda.gov/News/docs.htm?docid=9446). This is what I could find about their data: "Data have been compiled from published and unpublished sources. Published data sources include the scientific literature. Unpublished data include those obtained from the food industry, other government agencies, and research conducted under contracts initiated by USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS)." (http://www.ars.usda.gov/sp2UserFiles/Place/80400525/Data/SR/SR28/sr28_doc.pdf http://www.ars.usda.gov/sp2UserFiles/Place/80400525/Data/SR/... <- page 2)
- silviogutierrez 10y agoThere are foods on which the standard processes don't accurately measure energy content. Or at least, certain manufacturers tell us that. Not sure if to believe them or not. Example: Quest bars. Their syrup would typically show 4 kcal per gram, but is actually closer to 2. Supposedly. That's how a bar can have so few calories and such good macros. Ultimately, if you're consistent with tracking your calories and its effect on your weight, it doesn't matter if the values are off by 20, 30, or 50%. Just be consistently off by... 50%.
- maxerickson 10y agoI'm not sure what the syrup in those bars would be, but most liquid sugar products have a pretty substantial portion of water by mass.
- silviogutierrez 10y agoThe original syrup was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomaltooligosaccharide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomaltooligosaccharide . I buy retail for my own recipes, under the brand name VitaFiber.
- blakesterz 10y agoThe Gastropod Podcast just had a great episode about measuring calories: https://gastropod.com/the-end-of-the-calorie/ https://gastropod.com/the-end-of-the-calorie/ "For most of us, the calorie is just a number on the back of the packet or on the display at the gym. But what is it, exactly? And how did we end up with this one unit with which to measure our food? Is a calorie the same no matter what type of food it comes from? And is one calorie for you exactly the same as one calorie for me? To find out, we visit the special rooms scientists use to measure how many calories we burn, and the labs where researchers are discovering that the calorie is broken. And we pose the question: If not the calorie, then what?"
- lukasm 10y agoIn Poland it's regulated, you can be off by 15%. My mate did tests in a lab. All products he picked showed 15% lower kcal value on the packaging. I pick reduced fat houmous from the fridge. The label says 100g has 256kcal (18g of fat, 13g of carbs, 8,5g of protein = 248kcal)
- alexbock 10y agoYou would have to be very confident in the accuracy of your measurements to throw away your margin of error like that. If you report values 13% lower to try to appeal to consumers and your lab numbers are off by 3%, now you're wrong by over 15% and you're going to have a problem (if anyone even notices, or cares). Are there any Polish media reports about this practice? It sounds like the kind of thing the American media would love to report about if it was happening here. (Anything that fits the basic format of "Are companies misreporting arsenic levels in your child's grape juice? Story at eleven!" is going to make a journalist here salivate.)
- chris_va 10y agoKind of reminds me of this story: http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/Teach/Math//Gamow_BreadRationingStory.pdf http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/Teach/Math//Gamow...
- alexbock 10y agoWould it be possible for the baker to distribute bread to customers in such a way that the weight appears to follow a fair curve for any one customer, but is still unfair if all loaves for all customers were analyzed in aggregate? (something like Simpson's paradox?) After the professor first discovered him he obviously could have started giving him loaves calculated to follow the fair distribution, but I'm not sure if it's possible to scale that technique.
- maxerickson 10y agoIf he is able to control the loaf the professor gets he could buy 1 correct form.
- jcfrei 10y agoI have a related question: Can the calorie count reliably predict the effect on a persons weight? Or is the amount of carbohydrates and fats much more important?
- chris_va 10y agoReliably? Short version is no, and it is even more complicated. Two individuals eating the same food will gain weight differently, depending on a large number of factors.
- misinformation 10y agoBit different answer: Yes it is possible. While it is true that two individuals eating the same food will gain weight differently, if you count your calories and measure everything you'll eventually learn (In the body building community we usually say two weeks) how many calories you need to keep your weight. With that information, you can adjust your calorie intake to lose weight. Say your maintenance is 2500 calories, then by eating 2000 instead, you'll lose 1 pound a week. Keywords if you want to look it up more: TDEE, 1 pound = 3500 calories, calorie in calorie out
- chris_va 10y agoThat is not entirely true (not entirely false either), the reality is more complicated. Your metabolism level, and the percentage of calories that are actually taken up by fat cells, depend on many factors besides total calorie count. A nice paper that came out recently: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151119143445.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151119143445.h... So, for example, person A can eat 3000 calories of cookies per day, but would gain weight on 3000 calories of rice. Person B could be the opposite. From the paper, it looks like genetics is a factor, though epigenetic factors and microbiome seem more important.
- street 10y ago>So, for example, person A can eat 3000 calories of cookies per day, but would gain weight on 3000 calories of rice. Person B could be the opposite. From the paper, it looks like genetics is a factor, though epigenetic factors and microbiome seem more important. That's not at all what that paper says. It describes that blood glucose response to various foods can differ between people (and shows to extreme outliers as examples). Your interpretation with "3000 calories of cookies" vs rice is both not supported by the study, and also nonsense. I'd look up the studies for this if I had the time, but: the actual correlation (relationship) between calories and weight gain/loss is extremely large, with the differences between most people of similar body types less than 200 calories/day.
- ourmandave 10y agoDepends on what side of the package you're reading. On the back label its says calories per serving. On the front they use a different serving size to make it seem like it's low-cal. Like popcorn that's 140 cals/serving, but on the front it says 35 cals per cup. http://www.foodfacts.com/ci/nutritionfacts/snack-foods/smartfood-delight-sea-salt-popcorn-55-oz/92496 http://www.foodfacts.com/ci/nutritionfacts/snack-foods/smart... Or a pkg of 2 cupcakes is 380 cals, but they'll say 190 cals per cake (in small type). It makes you think it's 190 for the pkg of cakes.
- ng12 10y agoBut they also list servings per package. As someone who relies on this information out of medical necessity I've never felt it to be that confusing. The EU/UK, on the other hand, makes it incredibly difficult by listing things in units of 100g. Nothing like sitting in a dark movie theater trying to calculate fractions.
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- TillE 10y agoThe 100g listing is mandatory, but many products will have an extra column for portions where it makes sense. If they don't, you might need to pull out a calculator to figure out how much sugar is in x bits of chocolate, but it makes comparing different products much simpler.
- jobigoud 10y agoI often find it more convenient actually because often you don't eat "one serving". Consider breakfast cereals, rice or pastas. Having the per 100g values allows you to actually compare one item to the next. When I'm the US I find myself trying to convert back the per serving to per 100g to get back to known territory.
- anarazel 10y agoThis. Not even primarily due to health/nutritional concerns. A lot of the cereals in the US are way to sweet for my taste. Haven't found a better way to figure out which isn't other than comparing contained sugar.
- tezza 10y ago> 9 Kcal/g for fat. [...] These numbers were originally determined by burning This method for calculating the calorie count for fat has in my opinion allowed the demonisation of fat. Our stomachs are imperfect at digesting globules of fat. Burning-until-gone releases much more of the energy than surface acting acids and proteinases. Effective calorie count for fat just has to be so much lower than the listed value. Constrast that with sugars, where the absorbtion mechanism is crystaline dissolution. Disolving crystals is an almost perfect 1-1 process
- maxerickson 10y agoIt's a well understood process: https://courses.washington.edu/conj/bess/fats/fats.html https://courses.washington.edu/conj/bess/fats/fats.html Also, you can experience what happens when you don't digest fat by eating a good bit of Olestra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra#Side_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra#Side_effects
- snewk 10y agodon't eat olestra
- goldenkey 10y agoAlso dont eat fish oil capsules on an empty stomach. Your Herman Miller chair will receive a present that you could not help deliver. The oil will literally leak out since there is no other digested food to keep it behind your sphinter. One of the weirdest stenches of partially digested fish oil bile that resists all attempts to nuetralize the stain and odor. I am passing on great wisdom as funny and crude as it sounds..(That chair was eventually sold at a huge discount and was probably bleached. Steelcase Worklounge is better anyhow so I'm not totally out of shape about it.)
- ysleepy 10y agoThe body is very efficient in storing fat, more than carbs or protein. But burning fat is inefficient. But this is just from the top of my head. I think its just a lot easier to eat a lot of carbs. Fats and protein make me much more saturated more quickly. I don't think there is some magic formula.
- dc2 10y agoThis is a question that's itched me constantly for over 15 years that I never bothered to look up. Anyone else?
- qq66 10y agoThis reminded me of a question I've always had... there's always a lot of mass of the food not accounted for in the Fat/Carbohydrates/Protein/Fiber. For example, a can of food that weighs 454g net might only have 150g accounted for in the nutrition facts. What's in the rest of the food, besides water?
- refurb 10y agoProbably fiber and water. When they measure fiber, they tend to measure specific types of fiber. I'm assuming there are a lot of undigestible things in food that don't fall into the neat categories.
- niels_olson 10y agoWhat's funny to me is that "fiber" is just ripped up plant cell walls and interstitial material, which is virtually all carbohydrate. it's just that it doesn't all get truly digested.
- spoofball 10y agousda when measuring cooked or raw beans, for example, measures them differently. for example cooking 100g of beans in 500g of water would result in, let's say, 450g of beanwater (beans + water). usda takes 100g of that beanwater and says it's 100g of cooked beans (water content of cooked beans is way higher than in raw beans [their tables say]). I was worried there's not enough protein in 100g of cooked beans, but there is, it's just not 100g of cooked beans, it's 450g of beanwater.
- gniv 10y agoAsh: http://www.livestrong.com/article/449416-what-is-ash-in-food/ http://www.livestrong.com/article/449416-what-is-ash-in-food...
- yodsanklai 10y ago> The original method used to determine the number of kcals in a given food directly measured the energy it produced.The food was placed in a sealed container surrounded by water--an apparatus known as a bomb calorimeter. The food was completely burned and the resulting rise in water temperature was measured. I don't think the article addresses the following point. I may be totally wrong but I suspect the residues of the combustion still contain organic molecules that could possibly be broken down furthermore by some other process and release more energy (I believe it's the case with fuel, I remember a chemistry teacher telling us that burning fuel was terribly inefficient). Would it be possible that the digestion mechanism is somehow more efficient at breaking down this molecules and produce more energy than combustion?
- gambiting 10y agoConsidering how nutritious(for bacteria) our faeces are, I strongly suspect not. If anything, we know that calories from certain types of food (like nuts) are not absorbed in 100%, so even though a packet of nuts might say it has 500 kcal, it doesn't mean you will get 500 kcal out of it.
- eru 10y agoDigestion is a red herring here. It's how the nutrients are turned to energy in the cells. And that's an oxidization, just like burning but more controlled.
- jackgavigan 10y ago> ..you can also download the food database to a handheld compUter. I'm going to start referring to smartphones as "handheld computers".
- BurningFrog 10y agoCooked food often have much more digestible calories than raw food. Because the heat breaks down complex molecules and make them easier to digest. This isn't reflected at all in these measurements. This is why it's real hard to stay healthy on a raw food diet. I learned this from this book, which I really recommend: https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human-ebook/dp/B0097D71MQ https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human-eboo...