Eli5: How can edible items have 0 calories in them while still contain nutritional items like carbs (sugars and other sweeteners), vitamins, and amino acids (BCAAs etc.)?

Question

Eli5: How can edible items have 0 calories in them while still contain nutritional items like carbs (sugars and other sweeteners), vitamins, and amino acids (BCAAs etc.)?

In: Chemistry

Answer 1

You have two things going on here.

1. The label can round down. So if there are 0.499 Calories in a serving it can list 0. Bonus: Serving sizes for a lot of items are arbitrary so they adjust the serving size to hit the 0 Calorie rounding sweet spot

2. Artificial sweeteners are in there in very small amounts. I forget the numbers but an easy way to explain it is that the artificial sweeteners are thousands of times sweeter than regular sugar, so you only need very tiny amounts to make something very sweet.

Obviously number two has a lot of nuances and complicated things going on, but that doesn’t belong on ELI5.