For example on my sparkling water it’s flavored with “natural flavors” but is still zero sugar and zero calories
In: Chemistry
There is a wood that contains a chemical that smells like strawberries. You can extract that chemically and put it in water and the water tastes a bit like strawberries. It’s like how vitamins and minerals don’t count as calories. If your body can’t use it for energy it’s zero calories.
In short, It’s trace oils derived from plants and such, Crazy crazy concentrated so it doesn’t effect the nutrition facts.
Think about putting a single drop of red dye in a glass of water, the water is still 99.9% pure water but now it’s completely red
They’re often extracts, oils, and concentrates taken from real ingredients.
They’re considered to be zero calories because they’re used in such small quantities that you aren’t getting any meaningful sort of energy from them. Food labelling rules (at least in the US) allows you to round the calories per serving down so even if the one drop of flavoring added to a bottle of water adds a calorie or two, it can still legally be labelled as having zero calories.
The chemicals responsible for the taste of a food were extracted from a natural source rather than made artificially. Any sugar that was in the source was removed before being added to the sparkling water.
What compounds contribute to the flavor depends on the flavor you’re going for. Often it is a mix of easily vaporized organic compounds (we’re talking compounds of carbon, hydrogen, and often other elements like oxygen and nitrogen). [This study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3921181/) for instance, notes 31 different chemical compounds that contribute to the flavor of strawberries.
That these compounds are easily vaporized is important. Aside from the five basic tastes of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (savory); smell is a large part of taste.
Flavors are chemicals that the human tongue and nose has receptors for. If you want to taste vanilla you’re going to need some C8H8O3. Where to get it? Well, vanilla beans are full of the stuff, but they come from an orchid and are expensive. Lignin from plants however also contains C8H8O3 and you can use various solvents and other chemicals to extract it more cheaply than you can from a vanilla bean. Sometimes these flavor chemical recipes are their own thing, like how “wild cherry natural flavor” doesn’t taste much like a real cherry fruit, it’s just a tasty recipe cooked up in a natural flavor lab. The use of natural makes people think it means it comes from the actual thing it’s supposed to taste like, but other terms like “extract” are used for that. These flavor molecules aren’t really something the body can break down into sugars to fuel cells, so they’re zero calories.
Calories and flavour aren’t one and the same; something can have a taste without having meaningful calories (as another comment points out, your body needs to be equipped to process a given compound to derive energy from it). And a lot of things are so flavour dense that you don’t need to reach a meaningful amount of energy for it to taste really strongly – hot peppers are a good example. Many hot sauces are made mostly of peppers and vinegar, which do have caloric value, but the serving sizes are so small that the amount of calories you ingest from them is negligible and the manufacturer is able to round the reported calories per serving down to zero.
Food and drinks are rarely if never zero calories. The labeling rules allow them to round down so if its only a few calories they are allowed to put it down as zero. You munch or drink enough of that and its alot more than zero haha. Water, and i mean plain unflavoured water (come on thats not water ita juice haha), is about it for zero calories in a drink or food.
Consider “0 calories” to actually say “less than one calorie” That’s really more what it means.
Flavors never really provide calories on any significant level, as they’re basically just smells that we experience while eating something.
Chemically, flavors are very small molecules that fly readily into the air, which means they’ll fly into our noses and olfactory systems, causing “smells”. They are distinct from the things we can “taste”, such as sweet and salty, which we detect on our tongue.
Flavors will often come naturally with things that have calories (e.g. the flavor of a steak comes with all the fat and proteins of the steak when we eat it), but the flavors themselves are tiny molecules separate from those things.
When we get “natural flavors”, we capture those little molecules that cause smells. This capture process can be complicated but can also be simple (if you put whiskey in a wooden barrel, the smells of the wood enter the whiskey, etc.).
We can either capture the flavors from the thing itself (e.g. strawberry flavor from a strawberry) or from anything else that smells like it. Often, the reason two things will have similar smells is because the molecules are exactly the same… which makes sense because all living things have a shared evolutionary history and tons of molecules in common.
A great example of the above is that the molecule of “almond flavor extract” is exactly the same as the molecule of “cherry flavor extract”. This makes sense because cherries and almonds are actually very closely related (google some images of cherry trees and almond trees). So would it make sense to extract the flavor from an almond to make a cherry ice cream? Yeah, it would make no difference at all – they are genuinely identical molecules.
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