For example on my sparkling water it’s flavored with “natural flavors” but is still zero sugar and zero calories
In: Chemistry
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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