How does a can of Orange Fanta list 160 calories when it contains 43 grams of sugar, which alone adds up to 172 calories?
In: Chemistry
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This wouldn’t really be a chemistry question, more of a food state department regulation question
Because of approximations.
For starters the “4 calories per gram” rule your applying isn’t exact. It’s usually something closer to 3.7-3.9 depending on what exactly the ‘sugar’ is.
Similarly, the numbers on nutrition labels are not exact. Calories over 50 are rounded to the nearest 10, so “160” calories means between 155 and 165. Similarly for carbs anything over 1g gets rounded to the nearest gram, so “43g” means between 42.5 and 43.5.
I’s not refined sugar but corn syrup which is 3kcal/gram not four. So that’s 132kcal from sugars and 28 left for everything else.
Because do you want a, wanta a Fanta?
mostly the calories are calculated per 100 ml or another smaller quantity than the can itself
Now, to add on top of all this, I worked as quality control for Coca Cola, so I actually did a lot of these analyses. What can also make the sugar content inaccurate is just artifacts in production. We do our best to control everything as best as possible, but the mixing vats are enormous, and we have multiple parameters to keep between certain values.
For example, for Fanta: Citric Acid levels, pH, Sugar content and Vitamin C levels.
Sometimes there is no way to get all of these within the desired values, and one of them has to be slightly off. As the Fanta arrives as pre-made syrup, that has slight variations per production batch, and the only control we have is how much water to add, we have to choose which values we absolutely need correct, and which can be slightly off. The sugar being a bit off is legally less a problem than the Vitamin C levels being off.
With cola it would be the caffeine levels that have to be spot on.
Now, as we’re in the EU, and we use Sucrose and not corn syrup, that means the sucrose can sometimes split into Fructose and Glucose. But the measuring tool we use doesn’t see a difference between these three, so it will count a sucrose as “one sugar”, but if it splits it will count it double. So the amount by weight is the same, but the measurements are a bit off. We actually have to account for this. The longer a tank of mixed coke stands before going to the cans, or bottles, the bigger this effect becomes.
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In case anyone asks, yes, we could drink all the coke and coke related products we wanted during our shift.
Luckily we also bottled mineral and sparkling water.
I’d be very interested in the taste of coca cola if you put lets say just the half amount of sugar in the recipe, but the rest stays the same. I cant stand the taste of Aspartame and 10g/100ml is too much for me. Is it a big difference in taste when there is only half the amount of sugar in it?
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