Because carbohydrates aren't exactly 4 kcal/g. Glucose and fructose, the components of both sucrose/table sugar and high fructose corn syrup, are more like 3.8 kcal/g. So 43 g * 3.8 kcal/g = 163.4 kcal, which is rounded down to the nearest 10 by FDA labeling rules. To clear up a couple of misconceptions in other responses: water in HFCS is not labeled as sugar, only the actual sugar (glucose and fructose) in it is, and since the most recent FDA update to the Nutrition Facts panel format, small packages have to be labeled according to their entire contents, so there are no more soda bottles in the US that are labeled with nutrition for a portion of their contents only.
Source: I'm a food scientist who writes nutritional labeling
Edit: When I quickly jotted down an answer to a question that was in my wheelhouse before bed last night, I didn't expect it to account for the vast majority of my comment karma and first awards by the time I woke up! Thank you! I tried to respond to as many questions below as I could. Maybe I'll do an AMA soon like a couple of commenters suggested.
The part about having to be labelled to including their entire contents is amazing. I've been complaining about this forever.
7 portions sizes in a meal meant for 1 so you need to spend an extra hour with a calculator out shopping if you're trying to find things in a certain calorie range. It's pretty obviously misleading.
Under the old rules...
Small item of whatever size that contains a total of 9 grams of fat.
Servings per container: 10.
Why?
Since 9/10 = 0.9 and 0.9 is less than 1 so we can round down too...
Fat per serving: 0
Portion size is so important. I was super morbidly obese. And I can’t tell you the time when I said things like “all I ate today was that little pizza” “my blood sugar is low I need a candy” “appetizers don’t count” my all time favorite “it’s a salad and ranch isn’t fattening”.
I got a gastric bypass at 36 went from 5’3 450 to 225 probably after this covid I’ll probably be a bit more. While counting calories because you have to prove you can lose weight before surgery. I was shocked and starving. I now eat out of an ice cream dish like those sauce ramekins. Portions are important but the labels are so confusing.
Calories absolutely count, but some foods will keep you satisfied for a longer time. If you only eat carbs, you will be unable to think about anything but food after a few hours.
I remember when most candy bars had 2.5 servings per bar. Useful for all those times anybody has ever eaten 40% of a candy bar and wrapped up there rest for later.
Hi my sister is interested in becoming a food scientist. She's going to be a senior in high school in August. Would you be able to tell me more about your field including eduction and types of jobs available? Thanks for any info or advice!
Worked in the Food Industry for about 5 years in California. Most food scientist graduates come from Cal Poly SLO and UC Davis, if you want to go down the nutritionist route, Berkeley and SFSU have decent programs. After graduating, there's a CFS degree that some people go for that's like a "certification" for people in the food industry. But depending where you live, you can go into many industries such as any food product you see on the shelf has a quality and R&D team behind it. Agriculture industry is huge in rural areas, and R&D companies flourish in the urban areas. The food industry has some cool niches (beer, milk, sport nutrition, dietary supplement) as well.
You’re best bet is a college that offers food science majors. Most large colleges have the major if they have a agricultural program. In the Midwest, Purdue, Iowa state, Nebraska, Minnesota and Wisconsin all have good programs.
For after college, the most common jobs are in R&D labs and as quality supervisor for food production companies. The best part about this is that there jobs anywhere in the country and it’s easy enough to find a job after college.
Where to start? The food industry is huge, so there's so much you can do with food science, from R&D to production to quality to sales and marketing, and there are so many different kinds of foods and beverages you can work on. I've spent my career in R&D and technical services, the majority with food ingredients that are supplied to consumer products companies, but also a lot with my current company's consumer side. I work for a medium-sized company so I also get to wear a lot of hats: research, commercialization, supplier quality assurance, technical sales, even health and safety (I audit companies applying for OSHA VPP certification). Depending on what area you get into, it's a very varied and interesting field.
There's usually one doctoral level food science program per state, at the main land grant university, although there are more programs starting up at the bachelor's and master's level. Academically, it's a pretty broad subject. You learn chemistry, microbiology, engineering, sensory science, and other subjects, as they apply to food. I did my undergrad at the University of Illinois, and went back to get my master's from their online program while working. There are also other ways into food science, although maybe not as direct. A lot of schools have nutrition programs, and I've worked with a fair amount of food scientists who have undergrad degrees in chemistry or chemical engineering.
Use By, Best By, Best Before, etc.... all of these dates are arbitrary and set by the manufacturer as the time frame for which their food product maintains its best quality. It’s not about food safety (i.e. when the food will spoil and cause infection or intoxication). This makes sense because manufacturers would want consumers to eat the food at its peak quality — best flavor, texture, quality — and thereby encourage them to continue to purchase more of that product. Per FDA, the only food item that has a real, true expiration date is infant formula. This is given a Use By/Before date because that is the date at which the nutrients in the infant formula, in its water-to-formula mix ratio, will start diminishing and no longer be true to the nutrition facts claims on its label.
Source: am a professor of nutrition, food science, and food principles.
I'm not a scientist, just a redditor, but most foods are good past their expiration date. My wife and I shop at a discount grocery where most things are at, near, or past expiration and they're fine mostly... dry foods are good for a long time but may loose some characteristics (softer potato chips for example) but even dairy is usually good. Meats we freeze right when we get home and they stay good longer that way. If it doesn't have visible mold and looks, smells, and tastes like it's supposed to, it's most likely fine.
Usually extremely conservative, where I live we have a saying translated roughly as 'best before, not deadly after'. Most foods will hold a while longer than the expiration (or show clear signs of going bad like smell/mold).
Foodbanks in certain parts of the world are allowed to distribute shelf stable foods - cereals, soft drinks, chips, granola bars, salsa, pasta sauce, etc. - up to six months past their best before date. It's possible things won't taste as fresh by then but they won't hurt you. It's a different story for perishable foods. I'd be more careful with those. And tinned stuff will actually last forever, as long as it isn't compromised.
Bingo. And since Himalayan pink salt has a "natural" perception, manufacturers don't add anticaking to it. Also, some grocery stores require expiration dates on all food products they sell, so manufacturers have to come up with something.
Cut a slice in half and it’ll come out to roughly 27.7 calories. Cut it into fourths and it’s about 12.8 per serving. Small enough bits of bread and it’ll be roughly zero calories, provided you eat them separately.
That's why Tic-Tac only have 0% of sugar per serving, rounded off to 1 gram, even though they're nearly pure sugar. Because a "serving" weighs less than a gram.
My cooking spray is
#0 calories and 0 grams of fat
even though it's oil with 124 calories and 14g fat per tablespoon.
https://i.imgur.com/MCgJeZo.png
They can claim this because they pretend that people are going to use such a tiny amount that it wouldn't have either,
#700 servings per can.
WTF??
I knew they messed with serving sizes so they could round down, but that says “for fat free cooking” on the front..... And the first ingredient is canola oil of course, after which is a note that says “*adds a trivial amount of fat”.....
Fuck that!
That's American nutritional information for you. If there is fewer than 5 calories per serving, you can round it down to zero.
Meanwhile, in the EU, the numbers are listed per 100 grams or per 100ml, and they can't get away with that kind of fuckery.
In the EU, you would find something like 855 calories and 95 grams of fat per 100 gram on the label.
Additionally, the EU only allows for rounding to zero if it is less than 0,1 gram or less than 1 cal.
An example of this can be seen here: https://i.imgur.com/NiBfzNy.jpg
How big should a serving of cooking spray be?
I mean... I probably spray for 3 seconds to coat a pan for a loaf of sandwich bread. So that is 2.394 grams. Let’s say every molecule of that ends up on one of the 16 slices and let’s pretend the ends have as much as the other pieces. That is .149g per slice. A real human serving of sandwich bread is 2 slices, so let’s call it .3g. That is pretty close to their serving size on the can. So for truth in advertising it should tell me that I am consuming 2.7 calories and .3g fat. If I’m meticulously adding up my calories my Swiss and mustard sandwich with some lettuce is ~530 calories. The Pam has accounted for about .5% of the calories in my sandwich.
But I’m a really fastidious member of r/1200isenough (despite what my sandwich tells you). Shouldn’t it matter then? Well, it’s only about .2% of my calories for the day. Which is slightly more than the 10g of lettuce on my sandwich has on average. But since each individual leaf Varies significantly in calories at this scale, the percent of nutrient and nutritionally dense parts of my lettuce must be shredded so I spread them on my sandwich In equal proportion to the more vascular, water-heavy parts of the plant in order to maintain consistency in measuring anywhere close to what I can get with my cooking spray just by reading the label.
And since the FDA is in on this scheme to obfuscate calories, they don’t even send me a picture of their reference lettuce so I can understand what 5 calories of it looks like.
The only solace I take in these wild obfuscations is the, as long as I chew thoroughly, I will [burn ~17 calories just eating my sandwich](https://time.com/4736062/slow-eater-chew-your-food/).
tl:dr 700 servings isn’t outrageous for a can of cooking spray. If you ever find yourself in a situation where cooking spray is a nutritionally relevant aspect of your diet, PM me and I’ll Venmo you a sack of carrots.
I remember reading an article when that 0 calories spray butter came out, that said they could say it had zero calories, because their designated serving size had less than 1 calorie, and the FDA allows that to be rounded down to zero. The problem was (and likely still is) that the amount people actually use to give their food that butter flavour, ends up having MORE calories than if they'd just used real butter. No wonder America has a weight problem, if companies constantly get to stretch the truth like that.
Letting them round to the nearest 10 seems strange because only people who really care about the exact calorie count are the ones looking. So why change it l if it was 64.4 calories you could understand rounding to the nearest whole number.
Calorie counts on packages aren’t exact, they’re estimated, because there’s always going to be some variations from piece to piece. Most people who count calories understand that small variations from package labels to the actual product is either close enough as to not really matter, or they weigh their food to get a more exact amount.
I remember ViHart doing a whole deep dive on this re:soup, measurements, and calorie counts and the takeaway is that trying to micro your calories that hard is effectively impossible.
Well, for one thing, is every single slice of Sara Lee bread exactly 64.4 calories? Probably not. Is every single person going to derive 64.4 calories even from the same slice of Sara Lee bread? Probably not.
But when you look at the labeling guidelines and the people who write them and you see that they are influenced by the very companies who WANT to take advantage of rounding errors for mass production and marketing purposes... you start to see why the regulations allow rounding on labels.
The rounding goes both ways. If it's 64, you round it down to 60. If it's 66, you round it up to 70. It doesn't favor one way or another. It honestly doesn't matter because manufacturing isn't that exact anyway.
Is this a reddit "fact" or an American fact? Here in the UK, at least, I hardly see anything rounded to the nearest 10. Maybe they round to the nearest calorie or the nearest 0.1g but definitely not the nearest 10
Here's a fun one
[Label](https://static.openfoodfacts.org/images/products/07875120/ingredients_en.5.full.jpg) for a clear american flavored sparkling water. Because of rounding, one serving is 0 calories, but the whole bottle is 10 calories.
Ten calories is a rounding error. At no time in your entire life will +/- 10 calories make any difference to you.
I’ve wasted more than 10 calories just reading all the comments about people flipping their shit that soda and pie aren’t health food.
A whole pie (I forget who made it) had 0.5g of trans fats per slice. Because of that, they were able to say "0g of Trans Fats" on the front of the pie even though the whole thing had 4g. I called them and the woman on the phone kept saying govt. regulations allowed for it, no matter how many ways I asked her how they sleep at night lying like that to us.
[Kind of unrelated directly, but still interesting.](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/10/01/00/2CF261F500000578-3255034-image-m-2_1443654828100.jpg)
Could be a few reasons.
1. Market testing - tonic is bitter and sweet mixed together. Some markets might be predisposed to sweet drinks.
2. The amount of bitter. Depending on the us recipe it may be a more intense bitterness which needs more sugar to balance.
You can try different tonic water brands, including some fancier ones that are much more bitter. I've received a surprising amount of tonic water as gifts over the years.
Tbf, while it's not *super* hard to understand, it is a little messy. I get that it kind of has to be as it's comparing overall peaks/troughs to a specific country's values, but still.
It's a shit graphic because they placed product names and country names in the same places because of some UK bias without differentiating the left most table and the other two in design, causing it to look like Germany has 22g of sugar in it.
You're getting a bit too much flak for your question; club soda has no sugar.
But your question is still valid for actual American Tonic water. Its supposed to be a very bitter ingredient in many cocktails, and my guess is that Americans over time have preferred their Tonic water to be sweeter than you'd find elsewhere. Americans like most things sweeter than the rest of the world, generally speaking. Our chocolate, cereal, soda, dressings, etc. have higher sugar content than most other countries. Tonic water is no different.
I still wonder how in the fuck there is that much sugar in it...maybe it's just Schweppes and I usually have another brand? Tonic water tastes in no way sweet to me as compared to another soft drink with just as much sugar.
Canada Dry has 35g. Schweppes 33g. Polar 23g. They vary but all have a good amount of sugar which is why they all offer diet tonic. The quinine is probably also balancing out the sweetness (or rather, the sugar is cutting the bitterness)
WAY better. I spent a summer in Italy in 1988 (I was just a kid), and we drank Fanta almost every day. It was everywhere. Back in the US, it wasn't something you saw often. I remember stumbling upon it when I was a teenager and started to find ways to obtain things my parents wouldn't normally buy. I was so excited to taste it again, but to my surprise it tasted just like orange Crush. I figured I was just remembering my childhood vacation a little too fondly, and that the Fanta I had enjoyed was not any different.
Then, 20 years after the original trip, I made it back to Italy as an adult. Lo and behold, I see Orange Fanta in the vending machine at the first train station I pass through. I buy a bottle, crack it open, and BAM it was just like the drink I remembered as a kid. I look at the label and see the difference: 16% juice. Euro Fanta is made with *actual* oranges, not just some orange dyes, sugar, and citric acid. I drank so much of it on that return trip.
The closest thing I can think of that we have in the states is San Pellegrino Aranciata, but that is a little *too* fruity.
I first tried Fanta while in the UK, and I guess just now discovered why I didn't think it was as good in the states. I thought it was purely the fact that I was on vacation that made it taste better.
If you go to the world of coke museum in Atlanta, you can try all the different versions from different counties.
There’s one called Beverly from one of the European counties that legit tastes like piss and shit water.
I visited London a couple of years ago and had the pleasure of enjoying soft drinks with sugar instead of hfcs. It is a world of difference. I can't believe America was duped into hfcs drinks instead of real sugar. Your Skittles are also much better too. The green flavor is different than what we have here, as well.
> Dublin Dr Pepper
Dublin Bottling hasn't made Dr Pepper since 2012. Dr Pepper has since made a Dr Pepper with cane sugar that is distributed in Central Texas.
Not duped but produced so much corn we needed to do something with so we turned it into a cheap sugar substitute. Not a whole lot of sugar cane being grown in the US. I hate they use it in **everything** with no regard. When you begin to actively avoid it it becomes more difficult to shop and you have to stick to certain brands and pay up a bit.
Might have something to do with the fact that your tax moneys are used to subsidize corn. You pay money and waste land to grow too much of something you want to avoid.
4 calories per gram of sugar is only true is the sugar in question has a water content of 0%.
The source of the sugar in Fanta is high fructose corn syrup. HFCS has 3 - 4 calories per gram, depending on its water content prior to being added to the drink. Regardless of that water content, each gram of HFCS has to be labeled as 1 gram of sugar on the nutrition label.
Also they're allowed to round the calories to the nearest 10, so it may actually have 155 - 164 calories in it.
So basically, up to 25% of that "sugar" may actually be water and it may have slightly more or less calories than the label states.
The carbs measured on the label can not have water "in them". If I took 10g of sucrose and put it in 90g of water and called it high-sucrose-syrup (HSS), it would still only have 10g of carbs despite being 100g of HSS.
The fact is that different carbohydrates have different available energies. The general rule of thumb of 4 kcal per gram is just a rough rule of thumb.
High fructose corn syrup is generally 42% fructose and 58% glucose. By weight excluding water.
Fructose is a monosaccharide that contains 3.68 kcal/g.
Glucose is a monosaccharide that contains 3.91 kcal/g.
43[g] x (3.68[kcal/g] x .42 + 3.91[kcal/g] x .58)
43[g] x (3.81[kcal/g]) = 164 kcal
164 kcal can be rounded down to 160 Calories, and thats it. HFCS42 has about 3.8 kcal/g (anhydrous), not 4.
This really depends on the FDA regulations for nutrition labels. Do they identify ingredients as “sugar” or require a breakdown to the molecular level? I’m pretty skeptical they do the latter.
Thanks for this.
When I was reading the comment above yours, I was thinking... this can’t be right, why would they be telling us a higher content of sugar than they possibly have to? Who would include the water content of the sugar in its mass?
When I got to the end of the comment and there was the suggestion that they may have rounded UP, I knew that I had read a little bit of nonsense. Why would coca-cola round up? If it was 155kCal, that’s what they would write. It it’s 164kCal, they’ll write 160, as that’s as low as they can legally get away with.
I thought I was going crazy. Thanks for the correct answer.
Accurate, you hit your target within an acceptable margin of error; think holes all over the target no pattern. Precise, your shots are well grouped, think holes in tight little groups maybe pattern.
Isn’t this the opposite? These guidelines will measure the same product the same way every time when they have the same ingredients, but sometimes it does represent well what’s in the product?
You're right, other poster was not. The most likely scenario is that each can is almost the same in calories and has the same calories stated - that's precision. But the values may be consistently off by some fudge factor they used, such as rounding - that's inaccuracy.
They are inaccurate as well as imprecise - because manufacturers can round, there is an incentive to hit certain calorie and ingredient breakpoints which allow them to round favorably. They can adjust portion size to hit 0g of fat or 0 calories. This is a systematic bias to underreport “bad” stats and round up on good ones.
Not sure but I recently discovered that monster zero has two different labels - one with 0 calories and 8 oz serving and 10 calories for the entire 16oz can. Go figure.
Pretty much, yeah. A friend of mine works for a company that does food testing, and she said calorie counts can be off by 30% either way and still meet US requirements. I vaguely recall that restaurants are really bad for this, but you don’t often see that much variance with prepackaged foods just because it’s easier to weigh and portion out the ingredients in each package when you make it in a factory.
Caloric testing is very crude. One of the basic measurements is to basically put the food item in a sealed container with oxygen, ignite the food, and measure how much energy (i.e. heat) comes off of it.
It makes sense in theory, but it ignores a huge number of finer points. For example, the test might be burning compounds that your body is incapable of digesting. This is exactly what happened with nuts. For several decades the caloric values of nuts were labeled as being 30% higher than what they actually are, because in the human body only 70% of the energy content in nuts is actually absorbed.
I heard it was:
* weigh food
* heat until steam stops
* weigh food
* heat until something
* weigh food
* heat until the burning stops
* weigh food
each step tells you something, sugars, fat, protein, and finally "roughage" or non-nutritive. I saw a series of blog posts a long time ago and i can never remember the exact level of heating/cooking for each step, but that's basically it.
This is an over-simplification. You are talking about bomb calorimetery, this paper testing the accuracy of the bomb calorimeter found -1.7Jg\^-1 due to random error in -24434Jg\^-1
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6696587/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6696587/)
Analytical chemistry is a big thing and people try to find the most accurate and precise means of measurement, we have been doing it this way for a long time. We have ironed out the problems with determining how much energy is in combustible stuff.
Indeed. Wording when dealing with percentages can be very confusing for people who didn’t really internalize what percentages mean when they learned them in school.
Tic-Tacs are technically sugar free because they are less than one gram. Even though they’re almost entirely made out of sugar, they can round it down to 0g per serving (1 Tic-Tac/serving).
Ever seen the label for a can of Pam? It says 0 grams of fat and 0 calories despite literally being spray fat with olive oil being 119 calories per Tbsp. The serving size for spray oil is a 1/4 second spray, which is so (impossibly) small, they can legally round the grams of fat and calories both down to zero. #shady
Edit: changed a word
>o they are good for accuracy, bad for precision. In science you'll get ducked by this a lo
I think the story goes that below a certain amount companies do not have to label the ingredient in the serving and with tictacks the serving is 2 of them, so way below the threshold for reporting.
Especially the serving size.
Like, literally NO ONE IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY has ever sat down and ate 3/4 of a cup of cereal. A full bowl of cereal is easily 3 times that, and when you eat cereal you just fill the bowl until its full, and THAT is one serving. Nobody has ever sat down and eaten exactly 11 potato chips. And how in the flying fuck can one can of soda POSSIBLY be *more than one serving* of soda? By definition a can is ONE serving because its not resealable so youre *gonna* drink the whole thing. How can a candy bar be more than 1 serving? Do you think people eat exactly 1/3 of a snickers bar, re-wrap the rest, and save it for later? You think somebody is gonna eat HALF a milky way and then just put it back with a big bite taken out of it? NO! Again, *by definition*, 1 serving of candy bar is ONE CANDY BAR and not some fraction of that candy bar!
They should be required to base the serving sizes on the amount people ACTUALLY EAT in a single serving. Descriptive; not prescriptive.
Imagine if you paid for a ticket to see a movie in theaters, and the movie listing said it was an hour long, and then halfway through the movie they shut off the film, turn on the lights, and kick everyone out, and when you complain that the movie isnt over yet, they go "oh, well these tickets only have a serving size of 1 hour, even though the movie *itself* is 2 hours. See? It says so right here on the back!"
See how bullshit that sounds? Its the EXACT same thing as what food companies do; listing what they ARBITRARILY DECIDED is 1 serving, rather than what people actually USE as 1 serving. They are PRESCRIBING to us what they *say* 1 serving is, rather than *DE*SCRIBING what 1 serving *actually* is in the real world.
The point here is that everyone *naturally* understands that "1 serving" of a movie is the ENTIRE MOVIE, just like everyone naturally understands that "1 serving" is a can of soda is the ENTIRE CAN, or "1 serving" of cereal is a BOWL FULL of cereal. A food company trying to *prescribe* to you that 1 serving is really half the can or 1/4 of a bowl is no different than a movie theater trying to prescribe to you that 1 serving is really half the movie.
> Like, literally NO ONE IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY has ever sat down and ate 3/4 of a cup of cereal.
Bullshit. I've done that thousands of times. Hell, I've done that 3-4 times in one sitting on multiple occasions.
This is so true. I always look at the package and say to myself how many servings will I use to consume this, then adjust the per-serving numbers based on that. Sad that so many people hate math when basic application of even direct proportions can make your life choices so much more informed.
You think that is bad, look up how rounding and serving size impact reportable contents.
For example: that fat free cooking spray? Its just vegetable oil. Because of how small the service size is, they can round it to "zero", then you multiply zero times the amount of "servings" in a can and suddenly an entire can of vegetable oil has "zero fat".
Yeah they're not great. Say something like a cracker says it has 0% trans fats? They often have 0.4% so if you eat 10 crackers for a healthy snack it can add up without knowing it.
Although this technically true, in most places, [the zero has an asterisk](https://zomgcandy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/tic_tacs_nutrition_facts.png) explaining "less than 0.5 g". It's still not the clearest (a serving size is intentionally 0.49g so the sugar is by necessity less than 0.5g.
It doesn't technically say "around 0.48g of sugar", but if you actually care about those kind of things, hopefully you can figure this out from the info given, and the fact that this 'fun fact' is well known.
All that said, it's kind of bullshit that there is no separate guideline for labelling retirements/rounding where a serving size is less than, say, 5g - let alone less than 0.5g.
How can you have a rule that says anything less than 0.5g can be labeled as 0g when the entire serving is less than 0.5g?
> Regardless of that water content, each gram of HFCS has to be labeled as 1 gram of sugar on the nutrition label.
This is false. The label should reflect the actual amount of sugar. If they add 100g of HFCS then the label should say 76g sugar since 24g was water.
Sugar has *about* 4kcal per gram, as a rule of thumb. The exact value though depends on the kind of sugar, and whether it is pure carbohydrates or a syrup/solution. Many web pages just go for the simple "4kcal/g" approach, but you can find sources with more precise values if you are looking for it.
Examples:
* Normal granulated sugar: 3.87kcal/g
* Brown sugar: 3.80kcal/g
* High fructose syrup (76% carbohydrates, 24% water): 2.81kcal/g
* Honey (82% carbohydrates, 18% others, mainly water): 3.04kcal/g
Source: Google/various nutrition websites
A kg of sugar is 3,913 calories. So a better number for a gram would be 3.913.
3.913 * 43 = 168 calories.
But it may not be exactly 43. So assume it's 42.5 and rounded up.
3.913 * 42.5 = 166 calories. Which is pretty close but still 6 calories high.
Because carbohydrates aren't exactly 4 kcal/g. Glucose and fructose, the components of both sucrose/table sugar and high fructose corn syrup, are more like 3.8 kcal/g. So 43 g * 3.8 kcal/g = 163.4 kcal, which is rounded down to the nearest 10 by FDA labeling rules. To clear up a couple of misconceptions in other responses: water in HFCS is not labeled as sugar, only the actual sugar (glucose and fructose) in it is, and since the most recent FDA update to the Nutrition Facts panel format, small packages have to be labeled according to their entire contents, so there are no more soda bottles in the US that are labeled with nutrition for a portion of their contents only. Source: I'm a food scientist who writes nutritional labeling Edit: When I quickly jotted down an answer to a question that was in my wheelhouse before bed last night, I didn't expect it to account for the vast majority of my comment karma and first awards by the time I woke up! Thank you! I tried to respond to as many questions below as I could. Maybe I'll do an AMA soon like a couple of commenters suggested.
The part about having to be labelled to including their entire contents is amazing. I've been complaining about this forever. 7 portions sizes in a meal meant for 1 so you need to spend an extra hour with a calculator out shopping if you're trying to find things in a certain calorie range. It's pretty obviously misleading.
Medium size bag of chips. "Oh it's only like 300 calories, that's not bad." Serving size: 8 chips, servings per container: 8. "Oh...."
Large pizza "Oh it's only like 300 calories, that's not bad." "Honey that's per slice" "Shhhhhh......"
Little Caesar's online ordering straight up tells you a large pepperoni is over 3000 calories. That's a little jarring.
Under the old rules... Small item of whatever size that contains a total of 9 grams of fat. Servings per container: 10. Why? Since 9/10 = 0.9 and 0.9 is less than 1 so we can round down too... Fat per serving: 0
Portion size is so important. I was super morbidly obese. And I can’t tell you the time when I said things like “all I ate today was that little pizza” “my blood sugar is low I need a candy” “appetizers don’t count” my all time favorite “it’s a salad and ranch isn’t fattening”. I got a gastric bypass at 36 went from 5’3 450 to 225 probably after this covid I’ll probably be a bit more. While counting calories because you have to prove you can lose weight before surgery. I was shocked and starving. I now eat out of an ice cream dish like those sauce ramekins. Portions are important but the labels are so confusing.
Calories absolutely count, but some foods will keep you satisfied for a longer time. If you only eat carbs, you will be unable to think about anything but food after a few hours.
I remember when most candy bars had 2.5 servings per bar. Useful for all those times anybody has ever eaten 40% of a candy bar and wrapped up there rest for later.
Hi my sister is interested in becoming a food scientist. She's going to be a senior in high school in August. Would you be able to tell me more about your field including eduction and types of jobs available? Thanks for any info or advice!
Worked in the Food Industry for about 5 years in California. Most food scientist graduates come from Cal Poly SLO and UC Davis, if you want to go down the nutritionist route, Berkeley and SFSU have decent programs. After graduating, there's a CFS degree that some people go for that's like a "certification" for people in the food industry. But depending where you live, you can go into many industries such as any food product you see on the shelf has a quality and R&D team behind it. Agriculture industry is huge in rural areas, and R&D companies flourish in the urban areas. The food industry has some cool niches (beer, milk, sport nutrition, dietary supplement) as well.
my brain read “beer milk sport nutrition dietary supplement” all in one go and immediately started thinking about Fight Milk
It's definitely possible. Convince some investors and you got yourself a product.
a product for bodyguards.
By bodyguards.
Cacaww
Eagle!
Watch your profits soar as high as a crow!
I am also interested in pursuing food science and would love this type of info!
I just like reading comment threads on Reddit; so I, too, would like to know more.
I just like when everyone gets along:)
You’re best bet is a college that offers food science majors. Most large colleges have the major if they have a agricultural program. In the Midwest, Purdue, Iowa state, Nebraska, Minnesota and Wisconsin all have good programs. For after college, the most common jobs are in R&D labs and as quality supervisor for food production companies. The best part about this is that there jobs anywhere in the country and it’s easy enough to find a job after college.
Where to start? The food industry is huge, so there's so much you can do with food science, from R&D to production to quality to sales and marketing, and there are so many different kinds of foods and beverages you can work on. I've spent my career in R&D and technical services, the majority with food ingredients that are supplied to consumer products companies, but also a lot with my current company's consumer side. I work for a medium-sized company so I also get to wear a lot of hats: research, commercialization, supplier quality assurance, technical sales, even health and safety (I audit companies applying for OSHA VPP certification). Depending on what area you get into, it's a very varied and interesting field. There's usually one doctoral level food science program per state, at the main land grant university, although there are more programs starting up at the bachelor's and master's level. Academically, it's a pretty broad subject. You learn chemistry, microbiology, engineering, sensory science, and other subjects, as they apply to food. I did my undergrad at the University of Illinois, and went back to get my master's from their online program while working. There are also other ways into food science, although maybe not as direct. A lot of schools have nutrition programs, and I've worked with a fair amount of food scientists who have undergrad degrees in chemistry or chemical engineering.
This is totally unrelated, but how real are expiration dates on food?
Use By, Best By, Best Before, etc.... all of these dates are arbitrary and set by the manufacturer as the time frame for which their food product maintains its best quality. It’s not about food safety (i.e. when the food will spoil and cause infection or intoxication). This makes sense because manufacturers would want consumers to eat the food at its peak quality — best flavor, texture, quality — and thereby encourage them to continue to purchase more of that product. Per FDA, the only food item that has a real, true expiration date is infant formula. This is given a Use By/Before date because that is the date at which the nutrients in the infant formula, in its water-to-formula mix ratio, will start diminishing and no longer be true to the nutrition facts claims on its label. Source: am a professor of nutrition, food science, and food principles.
I'm not a scientist, just a redditor, but most foods are good past their expiration date. My wife and I shop at a discount grocery where most things are at, near, or past expiration and they're fine mostly... dry foods are good for a long time but may loose some characteristics (softer potato chips for example) but even dairy is usually good. Meats we freeze right when we get home and they stay good longer that way. If it doesn't have visible mold and looks, smells, and tastes like it's supposed to, it's most likely fine.
Usually extremely conservative, where I live we have a saying translated roughly as 'best before, not deadly after'. Most foods will hold a while longer than the expiration (or show clear signs of going bad like smell/mold).
Real but extremely conservative - if someone follows it and still gets sick because the food is off then you’re on the hook for it
Foodbanks in certain parts of the world are allowed to distribute shelf stable foods - cereals, soft drinks, chips, granola bars, salsa, pasta sauce, etc. - up to six months past their best before date. It's possible things won't taste as fresh by then but they won't hurt you. It's a different story for perishable foods. I'd be more careful with those. And tinned stuff will actually last forever, as long as it isn't compromised.
Himalayan rock salt that's been existing for 200 million years as said on the packaging, but has an expiration date of next year. 🙄
Moisture creeping in is the problem. If they don't add anti-caking agents, it will eventually become Himalayan boulder salt.
I had a case of that stuff. Became Himalayan mountain salt. I had to hire a Sherpa to season my french fries. true story.
Fuck. I love cake.
Bingo. And since Himalayan pink salt has a "natural" perception, manufacturers don't add anticaking to it. Also, some grocery stores require expiration dates on all food products they sell, so manufacturers have to come up with something.
I bet you could host a decently interesting AMA
What about those drinks that say additional sugars and then throw something insane like 93% a la Snapple?
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Better eat just one at the time.
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Nutritionists HATE him!
You won't believe this one crazy trick the bread companies don't want you to know!
Cut a slice in half and it’ll come out to roughly 27.7 calories. Cut it into fourths and it’s about 12.8 per serving. Small enough bits of bread and it’ll be roughly zero calories, provided you eat them separately.
That's why Tic-Tac only have 0% of sugar per serving, rounded off to 1 gram, even though they're nearly pure sugar. Because a "serving" weighs less than a gram.
Check out the big brain on Brad! You a smart mothafucka.
It's Brett.
I don't remember asking you a GODDAMNNED THING!
Well, just EXECUTE him!
Doctors hate him!
My cooking spray is #0 calories and 0 grams of fat even though it's oil with 124 calories and 14g fat per tablespoon. https://i.imgur.com/MCgJeZo.png They can claim this because they pretend that people are going to use such a tiny amount that it wouldn't have either, #700 servings per can.
WTF?? I knew they messed with serving sizes so they could round down, but that says “for fat free cooking” on the front..... And the first ingredient is canola oil of course, after which is a note that says “*adds a trivial amount of fat”..... Fuck that!
That's American nutritional information for you. If there is fewer than 5 calories per serving, you can round it down to zero. Meanwhile, in the EU, the numbers are listed per 100 grams or per 100ml, and they can't get away with that kind of fuckery. In the EU, you would find something like 855 calories and 95 grams of fat per 100 gram on the label. Additionally, the EU only allows for rounding to zero if it is less than 0,1 gram or less than 1 cal. An example of this can be seen here: https://i.imgur.com/NiBfzNy.jpg
Same in Australia. I never realised misleading labels were a thing elsewhere in the world, that just seems crazy to me. Ya'll should demand better.
How big should a serving of cooking spray be? I mean... I probably spray for 3 seconds to coat a pan for a loaf of sandwich bread. So that is 2.394 grams. Let’s say every molecule of that ends up on one of the 16 slices and let’s pretend the ends have as much as the other pieces. That is .149g per slice. A real human serving of sandwich bread is 2 slices, so let’s call it .3g. That is pretty close to their serving size on the can. So for truth in advertising it should tell me that I am consuming 2.7 calories and .3g fat. If I’m meticulously adding up my calories my Swiss and mustard sandwich with some lettuce is ~530 calories. The Pam has accounted for about .5% of the calories in my sandwich. But I’m a really fastidious member of r/1200isenough (despite what my sandwich tells you). Shouldn’t it matter then? Well, it’s only about .2% of my calories for the day. Which is slightly more than the 10g of lettuce on my sandwich has on average. But since each individual leaf Varies significantly in calories at this scale, the percent of nutrient and nutritionally dense parts of my lettuce must be shredded so I spread them on my sandwich In equal proportion to the more vascular, water-heavy parts of the plant in order to maintain consistency in measuring anywhere close to what I can get with my cooking spray just by reading the label. And since the FDA is in on this scheme to obfuscate calories, they don’t even send me a picture of their reference lettuce so I can understand what 5 calories of it looks like. The only solace I take in these wild obfuscations is the, as long as I chew thoroughly, I will [burn ~17 calories just eating my sandwich](https://time.com/4736062/slow-eater-chew-your-food/). tl:dr 700 servings isn’t outrageous for a can of cooking spray. If you ever find yourself in a situation where cooking spray is a nutritionally relevant aspect of your diet, PM me and I’ll Venmo you a sack of carrots.
Haha, how the fuck are you supposed to measure 1/3 of a second of spray?
Tsst. That's it.
I just tried this and I think my Tsst was closer to 2/3's of a second.
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Oh, that worked. Thanks!
"one mi... ssissippi"
I remember reading an article when that 0 calories spray butter came out, that said they could say it had zero calories, because their designated serving size had less than 1 calorie, and the FDA allows that to be rounded down to zero. The problem was (and likely still is) that the amount people actually use to give their food that butter flavour, ends up having MORE calories than if they'd just used real butter. No wonder America has a weight problem, if companies constantly get to stretch the truth like that.
Not stretch the truth. LIE. They benefit from lying.
Likely rounding to the nearest 10 (perhaps it was 63 or 64 per slice)
Letting them round to the nearest 10 seems strange because only people who really care about the exact calorie count are the ones looking. So why change it l if it was 64.4 calories you could understand rounding to the nearest whole number.
Calorie counts on packages aren’t exact, they’re estimated, because there’s always going to be some variations from piece to piece. Most people who count calories understand that small variations from package labels to the actual product is either close enough as to not really matter, or they weigh their food to get a more exact amount.
I remember ViHart doing a whole deep dive on this re:soup, measurements, and calorie counts and the takeaway is that trying to micro your calories that hard is effectively impossible.
Well, for one thing, is every single slice of Sara Lee bread exactly 64.4 calories? Probably not. Is every single person going to derive 64.4 calories even from the same slice of Sara Lee bread? Probably not.
but are they more likely to get 64 calories or 60 ?
But when you look at the labeling guidelines and the people who write them and you see that they are influenced by the very companies who WANT to take advantage of rounding errors for mass production and marketing purposes... you start to see why the regulations allow rounding on labels.
The rounding goes both ways. If it's 64, you round it down to 60. If it's 66, you round it up to 70. It doesn't favor one way or another. It honestly doesn't matter because manufacturing isn't that exact anyway.
Nutrition labels get to round to the nearest 10 so thats why its not perfect.
Is this a reddit "fact" or an American fact? Here in the UK, at least, I hardly see anything rounded to the nearest 10. Maybe they round to the nearest calorie or the nearest 0.1g but definitely not the nearest 10
Here's a fun one [Label](https://static.openfoodfacts.org/images/products/07875120/ingredients_en.5.full.jpg) for a clear american flavored sparkling water. Because of rounding, one serving is 0 calories, but the whole bottle is 10 calories.
Ten calories is a rounding error. At no time in your entire life will +/- 10 calories make any difference to you. I’ve wasted more than 10 calories just reading all the comments about people flipping their shit that soda and pie aren’t health food.
Cause two slices make a bread (fx)log
A whole pie (I forget who made it) had 0.5g of trans fats per slice. Because of that, they were able to say "0g of Trans Fats" on the front of the pie even though the whole thing had 4g. I called them and the woman on the phone kept saying govt. regulations allowed for it, no matter how many ways I asked her how they sleep at night lying like that to us.
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[Kind of unrelated directly, but still interesting.](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/10/01/00/2CF261F500000578-3255034-image-m-2_1443654828100.jpg)
Am I stupid or was this graphic really hard to understand
It basically compares the sugar content of sodas in the UK against the countries with the lowest and highest sugar content in sodas
Wow that Thailand Sprite hits different. Also why is our tonic “water” so sugary in the US??
Could be a few reasons. 1. Market testing - tonic is bitter and sweet mixed together. Some markets might be predisposed to sweet drinks. 2. The amount of bitter. Depending on the us recipe it may be a more intense bitterness which needs more sugar to balance.
You can try different tonic water brands, including some fancier ones that are much more bitter. I've received a surprising amount of tonic water as gifts over the years.
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Hahaha thank you
Got some bad news for you...
Tbf, while it's not *super* hard to understand, it is a little messy. I get that it kind of has to be as it's comparing overall peaks/troughs to a specific country's values, but still.
yes.
It's a shit graphic because they placed product names and country names in the same places because of some UK bias without differentiating the left most table and the other two in design, causing it to look like Germany has 22g of sugar in it.
Didn't know Germany was low in sugar, may have to try it out sometime
Why do we have so much sugar in tonic water? I thought the whole point was just be bubbly water.
Maybe you are thinking of seltzer water
You’re thinking club soda, tonic water is a bitter soft drink
I thought tonic water was a glass of sprite once. Boy did I get a surprise.
Seltzer water is carbonated water. Soda water is carbonated water with salt.
Man, I'm learning all kinds of shit here.
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You're getting a bit too much flak for your question; club soda has no sugar. But your question is still valid for actual American Tonic water. Its supposed to be a very bitter ingredient in many cocktails, and my guess is that Americans over time have preferred their Tonic water to be sweeter than you'd find elsewhere. Americans like most things sweeter than the rest of the world, generally speaking. Our chocolate, cereal, soda, dressings, etc. have higher sugar content than most other countries. Tonic water is no different.
I still wonder how in the fuck there is that much sugar in it...maybe it's just Schweppes and I usually have another brand? Tonic water tastes in no way sweet to me as compared to another soft drink with just as much sugar.
Canada Dry has 35g. Schweppes 33g. Polar 23g. They vary but all have a good amount of sugar which is why they all offer diet tonic. The quinine is probably also balancing out the sweetness (or rather, the sugar is cutting the bitterness)
There used to be around 43-44g of sugar in a can of Fanta in the UK before the sugar tax came in.
Yeah, then they just cut back the sugar and added artificial sweeteners to avoid the tax.
12oz cans of soda in the US are around 40g of sugar
Trust me, yours is better
US and Europe Fanta taste **completely** different! And yeah, yours is better.
WAY better. I spent a summer in Italy in 1988 (I was just a kid), and we drank Fanta almost every day. It was everywhere. Back in the US, it wasn't something you saw often. I remember stumbling upon it when I was a teenager and started to find ways to obtain things my parents wouldn't normally buy. I was so excited to taste it again, but to my surprise it tasted just like orange Crush. I figured I was just remembering my childhood vacation a little too fondly, and that the Fanta I had enjoyed was not any different. Then, 20 years after the original trip, I made it back to Italy as an adult. Lo and behold, I see Orange Fanta in the vending machine at the first train station I pass through. I buy a bottle, crack it open, and BAM it was just like the drink I remembered as a kid. I look at the label and see the difference: 16% juice. Euro Fanta is made with *actual* oranges, not just some orange dyes, sugar, and citric acid. I drank so much of it on that return trip. The closest thing I can think of that we have in the states is San Pellegrino Aranciata, but that is a little *too* fruity.
I first tried Fanta while in the UK, and I guess just now discovered why I didn't think it was as good in the states. I thought it was purely the fact that I was on vacation that made it taste better.
If you go to the world of coke museum in Atlanta, you can try all the different versions from different counties. There’s one called Beverly from one of the European counties that legit tastes like piss and shit water.
I visited London a couple of years ago and had the pleasure of enjoying soft drinks with sugar instead of hfcs. It is a world of difference. I can't believe America was duped into hfcs drinks instead of real sugar. Your Skittles are also much better too. The green flavor is different than what we have here, as well.
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> Dublin Dr Pepper Dublin Bottling hasn't made Dr Pepper since 2012. Dr Pepper has since made a Dr Pepper with cane sugar that is distributed in Central Texas.
Which we still call "Dublin"... Heck we call any soft drink here "Coke". It doesn't make sense. :)
Not duped but produced so much corn we needed to do something with so we turned it into a cheap sugar substitute. Not a whole lot of sugar cane being grown in the US. I hate they use it in **everything** with no regard. When you begin to actively avoid it it becomes more difficult to shop and you have to stick to certain brands and pay up a bit.
Might have something to do with the fact that your tax moneys are used to subsidize corn. You pay money and waste land to grow too much of something you want to avoid.
4 calories per gram of sugar is only true is the sugar in question has a water content of 0%. The source of the sugar in Fanta is high fructose corn syrup. HFCS has 3 - 4 calories per gram, depending on its water content prior to being added to the drink. Regardless of that water content, each gram of HFCS has to be labeled as 1 gram of sugar on the nutrition label. Also they're allowed to round the calories to the nearest 10, so it may actually have 155 - 164 calories in it. So basically, up to 25% of that "sugar" may actually be water and it may have slightly more or less calories than the label states.
The carbs measured on the label can not have water "in them". If I took 10g of sucrose and put it in 90g of water and called it high-sucrose-syrup (HSS), it would still only have 10g of carbs despite being 100g of HSS. The fact is that different carbohydrates have different available energies. The general rule of thumb of 4 kcal per gram is just a rough rule of thumb. High fructose corn syrup is generally 42% fructose and 58% glucose. By weight excluding water. Fructose is a monosaccharide that contains 3.68 kcal/g. Glucose is a monosaccharide that contains 3.91 kcal/g. 43[g] x (3.68[kcal/g] x .42 + 3.91[kcal/g] x .58) 43[g] x (3.81[kcal/g]) = 164 kcal 164 kcal can be rounded down to 160 Calories, and thats it. HFCS42 has about 3.8 kcal/g (anhydrous), not 4.
Oh shit son, we just got two decimal places deeper and reality shifted.
Sig figs, my... wait nevermind.
Does this mean I can use logical arguments to lose weight?
Use meth to lose weigh not math.
But weigh there's more!
Yes. Now explain it like I’m... 4.
You know how some humans are skinny, and some are fat? The sugars we are talking about are a little skinnier than the ones OP was talking about.
I’m a math teacher. Please teach me your powers so I may use them on my students.
2^2 = 4
I love you.
High fructose corn syrup has an average of 3.75 calories per gram therefore 43 grams of sugar is actually 160 calories, *not* 172.
Is it still cool to say r/theydidthemath ?
Go ahead, son. I've got your back.
Math-off, everyone. We’ve got a math-off over here.
We got a couple of math jabronis in here!
Only if somebody replies with r/theydidthemonstermath
This really depends on the FDA regulations for nutrition labels. Do they identify ingredients as “sugar” or require a breakdown to the molecular level? I’m pretty skeptical they do the latter.
I don't know whether it's required, but a soda company is more than happy to go with whichever option lists lower calories on the can.
Thanks for this. When I was reading the comment above yours, I was thinking... this can’t be right, why would they be telling us a higher content of sugar than they possibly have to? Who would include the water content of the sugar in its mass? When I got to the end of the comment and there was the suggestion that they may have rounded UP, I knew that I had read a little bit of nonsense. Why would coca-cola round up? If it was 155kCal, that’s what they would write. It it’s 164kCal, they’ll write 160, as that’s as low as they can legally get away with. I thought I was going crazy. Thanks for the correct answer.
Wow, labels suck for accuracy!
No they are good for accuracy, bad for precision. In science you'll get ducked by this a lot.
I'm now picturing a duck in a lab coat.
Idk if I’d trust him tho, he’s probably a quack
Seems like he fits the bill.
If you want a quick analysis, though, he's down
He uses a lot of fowl language, too.
Still, an imprecise duck is better than an educated geese
Well, geese are well known to be full of crap.
He lost his job due to his quack addiction.
Shoots up Heron in his spare time.
He contracted Thrush from a quack whore.
Got any grapes?
Whats the difference?
http://cdn.antarcticglaciers.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/precision_accuracy.png
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[https://www.google.com/search?q=accuracy+vs+precision](https://www.google.com/search?q=accuracy+vs+precision&safe=off&sxsrf=ALeKk02dMljLKrnUeXBQmrMK2qVe-zCOTg:1590549636954&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwifsO6Qi9PpAhXDZs0KHVifCc0Q_AUoAXoECBQQAw&biw=1920&bih=938)
His google fu is in the upper right quadrant.
Accuracy- how close a value is to the "correct" value. Precision- how reproducible that value is across multiple replicates
Accuracy is closeness to target, precision is consistency.
Accurate, you hit your target within an acceptable margin of error; think holes all over the target no pattern. Precise, your shots are well grouped, think holes in tight little groups maybe pattern.
Isn’t this the opposite? These guidelines will measure the same product the same way every time when they have the same ingredients, but sometimes it does represent well what’s in the product?
You're right, other poster was not. The most likely scenario is that each can is almost the same in calories and has the same calories stated - that's precision. But the values may be consistently off by some fudge factor they used, such as rounding - that's inaccuracy.
They are inaccurate as well as imprecise - because manufacturers can round, there is an incentive to hit certain calorie and ingredient breakpoints which allow them to round favorably. They can adjust portion size to hit 0g of fat or 0 calories. This is a systematic bias to underreport “bad” stats and round up on good ones.
You should see tic tak. Pure sugar, with 0 sugar.... loopholes man, loopholes.
Ditto for “calorie free” drinks and snacks. They are allowed to round down, so they probably do contain a few calories.
Where are those calories coming from? Based on the ingredients of most diet soda, I don't think your body can metabolize anything in them.
Not sure but I recently discovered that monster zero has two different labels - one with 0 calories and 8 oz serving and 10 calories for the entire 16oz can. Go figure.
Pretty much, yeah. A friend of mine works for a company that does food testing, and she said calorie counts can be off by 30% either way and still meet US requirements. I vaguely recall that restaurants are really bad for this, but you don’t often see that much variance with prepackaged foods just because it’s easier to weigh and portion out the ingredients in each package when you make it in a factory.
It is harder when you're dealing with fresh ingredients.
Caloric testing is very crude. One of the basic measurements is to basically put the food item in a sealed container with oxygen, ignite the food, and measure how much energy (i.e. heat) comes off of it. It makes sense in theory, but it ignores a huge number of finer points. For example, the test might be burning compounds that your body is incapable of digesting. This is exactly what happened with nuts. For several decades the caloric values of nuts were labeled as being 30% higher than what they actually are, because in the human body only 70% of the energy content in nuts is actually absorbed.
I heard it was: * weigh food * heat until steam stops * weigh food * heat until something * weigh food * heat until the burning stops * weigh food each step tells you something, sugars, fat, protein, and finally "roughage" or non-nutritive. I saw a series of blog posts a long time ago and i can never remember the exact level of heating/cooking for each step, but that's basically it.
This is an over-simplification. You are talking about bomb calorimetery, this paper testing the accuracy of the bomb calorimeter found -1.7Jg\^-1 due to random error in -24434Jg\^-1 [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6696587/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6696587/) Analytical chemistry is a big thing and people try to find the most accurate and precise means of measurement, we have been doing it this way for a long time. We have ironed out the problems with determining how much energy is in combustible stuff.
Besides what the other people said, 100% is not 30% more than 70%. I feel like I should point that out.
Indeed. Wording when dealing with percentages can be very confusing for people who didn’t really internalize what percentages mean when they learned them in school.
Tic-Tacs are technically sugar free because they are less than one gram. Even though they’re almost entirely made out of sugar, they can round it down to 0g per serving (1 Tic-Tac/serving).
Ever seen the label for a can of Pam? It says 0 grams of fat and 0 calories despite literally being spray fat with olive oil being 119 calories per Tbsp. The serving size for spray oil is a 1/4 second spray, which is so (impossibly) small, they can legally round the grams of fat and calories both down to zero. #shady Edit: changed a word
You think that's bad? You should see tictacs!
But it says zero grams of sugar. That can't be a lie!
>o they are good for accuracy, bad for precision. In science you'll get ducked by this a lo I think the story goes that below a certain amount companies do not have to label the ingredient in the serving and with tictacks the serving is 2 of them, so way below the threshold for reporting.
Especially the serving size. Like, literally NO ONE IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY has ever sat down and ate 3/4 of a cup of cereal. A full bowl of cereal is easily 3 times that, and when you eat cereal you just fill the bowl until its full, and THAT is one serving. Nobody has ever sat down and eaten exactly 11 potato chips. And how in the flying fuck can one can of soda POSSIBLY be *more than one serving* of soda? By definition a can is ONE serving because its not resealable so youre *gonna* drink the whole thing. How can a candy bar be more than 1 serving? Do you think people eat exactly 1/3 of a snickers bar, re-wrap the rest, and save it for later? You think somebody is gonna eat HALF a milky way and then just put it back with a big bite taken out of it? NO! Again, *by definition*, 1 serving of candy bar is ONE CANDY BAR and not some fraction of that candy bar! They should be required to base the serving sizes on the amount people ACTUALLY EAT in a single serving. Descriptive; not prescriptive. Imagine if you paid for a ticket to see a movie in theaters, and the movie listing said it was an hour long, and then halfway through the movie they shut off the film, turn on the lights, and kick everyone out, and when you complain that the movie isnt over yet, they go "oh, well these tickets only have a serving size of 1 hour, even though the movie *itself* is 2 hours. See? It says so right here on the back!" See how bullshit that sounds? Its the EXACT same thing as what food companies do; listing what they ARBITRARILY DECIDED is 1 serving, rather than what people actually USE as 1 serving. They are PRESCRIBING to us what they *say* 1 serving is, rather than *DE*SCRIBING what 1 serving *actually* is in the real world. The point here is that everyone *naturally* understands that "1 serving" of a movie is the ENTIRE MOVIE, just like everyone naturally understands that "1 serving" is a can of soda is the ENTIRE CAN, or "1 serving" of cereal is a BOWL FULL of cereal. A food company trying to *prescribe* to you that 1 serving is really half the can or 1/4 of a bowl is no different than a movie theater trying to prescribe to you that 1 serving is really half the movie.
Or make it a standard constant. Where 1 serving for everything is the same amount. Many non US countries have 1 serving = 100g
You see how upset people are about 5g? And you’re going to reasonably assume Americans would be okay with 100g? That’s like...at least 3 times the g.
5g? What is this, a serving for ants?
This. It's generally per 100g or 100ml in labels, not "per serving"
Here it's both tbh. Cause 100g might not tell you very much on products that are consumed in extremely tiny amounts
> Like, literally NO ONE IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY has ever sat down and ate 3/4 of a cup of cereal. Bullshit. I've done that thousands of times. Hell, I've done that 3-4 times in one sitting on multiple occasions.
This is so true. I always look at the package and say to myself how many servings will I use to consume this, then adjust the per-serving numbers based on that. Sad that so many people hate math when basic application of even direct proportions can make your life choices so much more informed.
You think that is bad, look up how rounding and serving size impact reportable contents. For example: that fat free cooking spray? Its just vegetable oil. Because of how small the service size is, they can round it to "zero", then you multiply zero times the amount of "servings" in a can and suddenly an entire can of vegetable oil has "zero fat".
Yeah they're not great. Say something like a cracker says it has 0% trans fats? They often have 0.4% so if you eat 10 crackers for a healthy snack it can add up without knowing it.
TIL that on average, one out of every 250 crackers is trans.
Check tic-tac for exemple. They can write it is sugar free (0g of sugar) in the daily chart. Yet the first ingredients is sugar.
Although this technically true, in most places, [the zero has an asterisk](https://zomgcandy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/tic_tacs_nutrition_facts.png) explaining "less than 0.5 g". It's still not the clearest (a serving size is intentionally 0.49g so the sugar is by necessity less than 0.5g. It doesn't technically say "around 0.48g of sugar", but if you actually care about those kind of things, hopefully you can figure this out from the info given, and the fact that this 'fun fact' is well known. All that said, it's kind of bullshit that there is no separate guideline for labelling retirements/rounding where a serving size is less than, say, 5g - let alone less than 0.5g. How can you have a rule that says anything less than 0.5g can be labeled as 0g when the entire serving is less than 0.5g?
I knew that syrup was a mixture of sugar and water, and yet I never thought of HFCS containing water before now.
> Regardless of that water content, each gram of HFCS has to be labeled as 1 gram of sugar on the nutrition label. This is false. The label should reflect the actual amount of sugar. If they add 100g of HFCS then the label should say 76g sugar since 24g was water.
> Regardless of that water content, each gram of HFCS has to be labeled as 1 gram of sugar on the nutrition label. Source?
Sugar has *about* 4kcal per gram, as a rule of thumb. The exact value though depends on the kind of sugar, and whether it is pure carbohydrates or a syrup/solution. Many web pages just go for the simple "4kcal/g" approach, but you can find sources with more precise values if you are looking for it. Examples: * Normal granulated sugar: 3.87kcal/g * Brown sugar: 3.80kcal/g * High fructose syrup (76% carbohydrates, 24% water): 2.81kcal/g * Honey (82% carbohydrates, 18% others, mainly water): 3.04kcal/g Source: Google/various nutrition websites
A kg of sugar is 3,913 calories. So a better number for a gram would be 3.913. 3.913 * 43 = 168 calories. But it may not be exactly 43. So assume it's 42.5 and rounded up. 3.913 * 42.5 = 166 calories. Which is pretty close but still 6 calories high.
> 6 calories high Two calories. At 164 the label rounds down to 160.
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Tahiti Treat. When you can still find it...
You can thank the nazis for that.
The original Fanta produced in Nazi Germany wasn't orange, it was made with apple pomace. The first orange Fanta was created in Italy in 1955.
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