What kind of testing or observations are needed to determine how many grams of protein a bean contains? Or how much iron is in a chicken breast?
In: Chemistry
You can take samples of individual ingredients and perform tests on them. There are all manners of tests in chemistry to figure out the composition of a sample – far too many to list here.
Once you know what is in an ingredient, a food manufacturer is allowed to use ‘equivalent’ foods that have already been tested as the nutritional information for their own products. So, if you have test results that say there is 1.7 mg of iron in 1c of flour, and your product contains 1c of flour, you don’t have to test your own product to be sure that is accurate – you can just say it has 1.7 mg of iron.
Latest Answers