This is driving me insane. How do they figure out the content of food. What do they use to determine how many calories, grams of fat, carbs, protein, micronutrients, etc.
Voodoo Magic
I knew it.
[quote]CarvedInsane wrote:
This is driving me insane. How do they figure out the content of food. What do they use to determine how many calories, grams of fat, carbs, protein, micronutrients, etc. [/quote]
thats actually a really good question. and now i’m wondering the same thing…but what i do know is that as far as nutrition labels go,there are a lot of regulations as far as what must be on the label, what you can claim(like when labels say’is a good source of fiber’ for example) and things that dont have to be on them… i was pretty suprised to learn in my nutrition class that if a food contains less than i think either 0.5 or less than 1.0 trans fat, they can legally say it contains NO trans fat. i don’t know how they calculate calories but i do know for sure that ther is 9calories/gram…
what gets me about a lot of people is that if they read ‘‘fat free’’ they automatically assume they can consume as much as they want and that they won’t gain weight. but what they dont realize is that more likely than not, it contains SUGAR. its also important to read the ingredients on the label as well. nutrition labels dont really help a person who doesn’t know how to read them properly…
if you find any information about how they calculate calories etc i would be interested to know…
“They” use a calorimeter. As far as macronutrient breakdown I’d guess that they determine that by looking at the byproducts of burning the substance or maybe how long it takes to burn.
They burn the food in a closed system and see how much heat it produces i think, that way they tell the how many joules it has and convert that to calories. ya thats what a calorimeter is i believe