Not sure if every country has this but a nutrition table is provided for every single packaged food product in my country, it made me curious as to how this information is derived.
To add onto this, how accurate is it? I find it hard to believe every single packet of chips of a specific brand contains the exact same amount of carbs
Thanks!
In: Chemistry
In the US there are a couple of options for food manufacturers. In the most direct method, they take samples of the food and send them to a lab for analysis. The labs use chemicals and burning to isolate nutrition components that they can measure accurately. This can get very expensive since food preparation or recipe changes can require retesting.
They also have an option for using ingredient listings and amount in a serving size to add up what the information should be. For example, a diet soda is mostly water, a little non-nutritive sweetener and some color and flavor. If the flavor is 1 gram of a standardized ascorbic acid concentrate, there is a standard amount of vitamin c in that flavoring. Add that to the label with the values for any other “nutritive” ingredients and you have your label.
Another method is using standardized values for certain foods. Corn chips, for example, can use the standardized lable if they use certain ingredients and flavorings (like cool ranch powder) contain “insignificant amounts” of sugar or other nutritive ingredients.
As you can see, there is a lot of margin for error, but generally speaking, you get accurate enough information to help make healthy choices.
They burn it and equate the heat to chemical energy. The precision is debatable.
In terms of nutritional value, there are ways to specifically extract target compounds from samples, and then it’s a simple calculation to determine quantity within the sample size.
As for accuracy on the labels, that’s just the averaged results from a number of tests. So obviously no pack of snacks will be identical, but averaged over enough packs and you can get a decent approximation of what is really in there.
They simply burn the food and measure the amount of resulting heat. Which is more or less what your body does with food too – burning it – albeit with far more intermediate steps to make the process more controllable. (Also extracting amino-acids for protein construction, but still).
You’ve never been outside your country?
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