I know people make fun of la croix having no flavor but it and other seltzer waters obviously taste like something! As an active seltzer lover, with new brands and flavors coming out all the time now, some of these are objectively quite flavorful and sweet. Yet, they have 0 calories, 0 sweeteners or sugar, only “natural flavors.” Do they really have 0 of everything or is it just such a small amount that they call it 0?
eli5 what natural flavoring means and how it can taste so strong with no sugar or anything so I can enjoy my seltzer without mental turmoil. Thank you!
In: Chemistry
Calories listed on food items are calories that are usable by the body. Take water for example, water has 0 calories but they still have bonded oxygen and hydrogen molecules. So there must be energy there. But the body doesn’t break down those molecules hence 0 calories.
So certain things like the sweetener may contain calories but not to humans because we cannot process or absorb them. Or we can absorb them but they have very little calorific value. In some drinks, where sugar isn’t used, a protein called aspartame is used. This is much sweeter than sugar and has a much lower calorific value since proteins broken down to amino acids and processed by our body only give us about 4 or less calories per gram. *and there’s less than a gram in these drinks*
The FDA also counts anything that has less than 5 calories to be 0 calories.
As for natural flavours, I don’t know. Maybe it is just fruit extract or something?
There is still some sweetener that comes from the “natural flavors” they use. Its just that theres non extra sugar or anything recognized as a high intensity sweetener by the FDA.
Regulations also allow you to put in less than some certain amount of calories (I think 5 per serving) and still call it 0 calorie.
And sorry, but natural flavoring just means that it started off in plants or animals and has only had certain specific chemistry done to it. Much of the time its not directly related to whatever the flavor is supposed to represent.
Probably some of both. I’m sure there is *something* in the drink containing *some* minuscule amount of calories, but it is very likely not the flavoring. The fact is that there are plenty of things which our bodies cannot harvest significant energy from which still have a taste. Salt is a very common example of such a chemical.
FDA does not require food companies to disclose the ingredients creating a “natural flavor,” so long as they all fall into the GRAS category chemicals “generally recognized as safe.”
Essential it may very well contain sugar and other artificial ingredients, just less than they are required to display. Their own website says it’s made from fruit essence, fruit contain sugar so it probably has some, just enough to taste but not enough to regulate.
Taste is not directly related to calories. Our sense of taste is more like a chemical analysis of something, giving us a clue of what it is made of. A silly example: you could eat dirt and while it would not have any calories, it would still have a (probably bad!) taste of sorts.
Taste is just there to help us determine whether we should or should not eat something.
Even just pure water has a taste as well because drinking water is never 100% pure (in fact, 100% pure water is actually toxic, but that is a topic for another question). There are always some trace minerals in the water, either because it is natural mineral water that got the minerals from its natural sources or because those minerals were added deliberately. And the specific amount of minerals and their type can very slightly change the taste of the water.
I don’t think anyone has mentioned this yet so here’s my go. Seltzer will *still* taste something even if it has nothing added to it. Carbonated water alone should have a flavor. Carbnonation works putting a drink under CO2 at high pressure, which forces some of the CO2 to dissolve into the liquid as carbonic acid. This is reversed when you crack the bottle and let the pressure off, but there is still some amount of carbonic acid in the drink as long as it’s fizzy, and this will have a sour taste (sourness is essentially the perception of acids).
That said, there are probably a bunch of other things added that have zero or negligible calories as others have mentioned, like minerals and such.
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