Eli5: How do they get the nutritional values for the nutrition information tables on food packaging?

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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

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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