How can a product consist of ingredients that contain calories, but the product has zero calories itself?
In: 19
There are certain materials that contain calories, but your body is incapable of processing them. Take cellulose for example. It’s got enough calories to make cows, sheep, and deer grow pretty darn big, but you’d starve to death eating it because you just don’t have the enzymes to break it down into a usable form.
It can’t, unless you’re talking about some food that contains a, b & c and c cost more energy to process than food in a+b
So it’s technically possible those ingredients are processed in such a way that they make it so the human body can’t access those Calories anymore. But that is basically never what happens, I cant even think of an example of that.
What *is* happening is that nutritional labels are allowed to round down So for example, tic tacs are just pure sugar, which definitely has Calories. But each tic tac has less than 5 Calories so they can say it has zero.
In the us, the usfda has a loophole where if an item has less than five calories per serving, it can be labeled ‘zero calorie.’ Common example: tictaks. Pure sugar, but around 4 calories per piece. Serving size is one piece, so legally, the factory can print “zero calorie” on the label and not be sued.
If the serving size of the product has less than 0.5 grams of fats, carbohydrates, or protein, the amount is rounded down to 0, resulting in 0 calories.
Many products take advantage of this loophole. For example, PAM oil spray, which is pure oil (fat), has a serving size of 0.25 grams, resulting in 0 calories per serving.
Also if you are in the USA then they can call it 0 calories if it has less than 5 calories. If that 0 calorie salad dressing has 1 table spoon as the serving size then you can be pretty sure that that cup is dressing on your salad has a good bit of calories in it
Extremely baffling to read the US has a law like this (rounding calories down) as a European (much stricter consumer product / food laws that protect the customer & not corporations here).
But also, fun fact – Uranium has BILLIONS of calories PER GRAM. You just can’t digest and absorb them all.
Latest Answers