How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Brief searching suggests that proteins are measured with a nitrogen content test and fats are determined by mixing the food with a non-polar solvent to see how much dissolves. Carbohydrates seem trickier and I haven't found a great explanation. Water solubility might work once the other components are removed.
The pet food "brands" don't have their own factories. They all contract it out to the same place. A few journalists remarked on this secret fact that came out because of the recall.
We agonize over which brand is healthier for our cats and dogs, but it's all an illusion. The majority of US and Canadian pet food is made at one factory with the same basic animal ingredients, same quality control, same employees, and the same machines. Maybe they adjust the proportions slightly and tweak the flavors. Then they slap on different labels like Purina, Iams, Royal Canin, whatever.
It's saddening to learn that we really don't have as much choice as we think. I'm much more skeptical and questioning than the average person, and yet I assumed that the pet food's "brand name" somehow made a difference.
This is true if you're talking about wet pet food - there are other makers of wet pet food and dry pet food (which is over half the market) is made by other companies. Mars/Nestle (the same people who make candy...)
if you aren't feeding your pet meat that you eat, it's living on extreme crap.
[1]: http://www.dogfoodadvisor.com/dog-food-industry-exposed/unfi...
Animals that are sick or unhealthy are separated from the herd and slaughtered independently, then sold for pet food and livestock feed. This was partly what fostered the mad cow issue.
There is higher risk for illness with non-human grade food. If you don't want higher risk for your pet than child, you shouldn't feed the off-the-shelf non-human grade food.
This is... an interesting generational thing, I think. To most older people, the idea of caring as much for your pet as you would for a child seems viscerally wrong. They even economize on pet healthcare. but... among those younger than me, your view, as far as I can tell, seems to be the norm. The very idea that you might be unwilling to go bankrupt paying for medical care for your pets seems abhorrent.
Personally I can't understand the logic. Who cares what species something is, it's just a question of level of consciousness. A dog is pretty much a 2 yr old child. Why have no concern for such a consciousness, whether it's an animal, android, human, or whatever.
So is a pig, so this logic really only applies to vegetarians. There is still something else that motivates meat eating people to care more for their pets.
The quality of life of farm animals should also be respected. If they live their lives in suffering, that shouldn't be taken lightly.
At the same time all animals will die at some point, with or without human intervention. If that death happens at a slightly different time for the reality of the way nature works, that's not inconsistent.
Keep in mind that wild animals don't generally die of old age gracefully on a golf course. More often than not they're ripped apart by some other animal, or starve to death from injury, or are consumed by disease, etc. Death by human hands is probably one of the less cruel fates.
A free-range animal on a cruelty-free farm (if that really exists), with the benefits of human medicine, and a precisely implemented death, is probably one of the happier existences an animal can have.
Only if you put down any pet immediately when it becomes sick with something non trivial (what we do with farm animals). However, that's not the case when people spend thousands on a pet to keep it alive with complex treatments.
I mean, I'm not saying this is right or wrong, just that this is how most people see the matter.
Totally. Not too long ago, pets, and livestock, would be fed table scraps and glad of it.
Like we've been taught - actually shamed - into using soap, deodorant and sundry other 'essentials' to the soap manufacturers well-being, so with pet care.
Curious about what else they'll come up with next to mop up wealth and productivity. It's bound to be amusing.
The most common dangers are onions (or things cooked in onions) and chocolate. They contain chemicals that are toxic to dogs and should always be avoided.
Similarly, many humans are allergic to many foods, and not every human can eat all "human-grade" food.
"human-grade" is only a measure of risk of unexpected contents (disease) in the food - not a recommendation that all humans should always eat it.
Apparently this trait evolved as a way to keep the nest clean and safe during nursing of pups.
But to each his own.
[1] http://www.slideshare.net/Euromonitor/state-of-the-pet-care-...
One roster:
http://aplusflintriverranch.com/define-menufoods-petfoodreca...
The fact that one factory makes the food doesn't mean brands are illusion. One factory can make different kinds of food. True, machines and employees are the same, but that does not mean food content is the same - in fact, different companies may very well order very different mixes to be packed on the same equipment.
In fact, the same factory produced Chevrolet Prizm and Toyota Tacoma - but they are hardly the same car.
In Australia you can buy packets of kangaroo meat for consumption by pets as kangaroos are essentially pests in many areas. This results in a large supply of meat that has limited commercial value so most supermarkets will stock frozen packets of what is (I believe) 100% kangaroo mince for people to feed to their pets.
Curious if there is an equivalent option elsewhere.
Does manufacturing the product at the same location imply that the content is the same?
When bought in bulk, milk isn’t priced by the liter because it is too easy to water it down. Instead, it is priced by kilograms of protein.
Measuring protein is hard, so they measure nitrogen instead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kjeldahl_method#Conversion_fac..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumas_method#Advantages_and_li...). Melamine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melamine) is cheap, rich in nitrogen, and, unfortunately, poisonous.
Why don't they want to make more money?
Nutricia, the Dutch milk powder company, cannot easily sell Dutch milk powder to China because import/export regulations don't easily allow them to do so. So they opened a store in China. But because of Chinese food regulations they cannot use the original formula. But consumers distrust the Chinese store because the formula has been altered. So people keep buying "real" Dutch milk powder fron smugglers.
"Two people were executed, one given a suspended death penalty, three people receiving life imprisonment, two receiving 15-year jail terms,and seven local government officials, as well as the Director of the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), being fired or forced to resign"
Farmers' inputs were getting more expensive but they were prevented from raising prices. So some farmers were more likely to resort to such poisonous fraud.
Of course, the foreign milk products they import these days are even more expensive.
E.g. if you're making frozen pizza just add up flour, the pepperoni etc. you put in and divide it by portion size.
I only brought it up in the first place because whenever a simple solution to a complicated problem is put forward, it will inevitably turn out that it's either not general enough or special cases need to be handled to keep it simple. There's nothing wrong with needing special cases, but it's always nicer to figure out what the special cases will be before someone does a bunch of architectural work that hasn't considered them.
I've also made beer, and it bubbles like crazy once it gets working. One possible difference is that bread is made from (mostly) starch, whereas beermaking converts starches to sugars before fermentation, and the yeasts can work more efficiently on sugars.
Of course you can also load up commercial pizza with sugar... one of the reasons why we make our own pizza.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1709087/?page=1
As an aside: My understanding was that most breads don't vent all that much CO2. Bread doughs are not risen in processes that leave the opportunity for rapid bubble formation and dissolution; If they did, baking after that first rise would give you a layer of thick dense bread, and another layer of fluffy bubble-bread on top.
Flour 765 g, some white and some whole wheat
Yeast 18 g, probably too much
Water 611 g, eyeballed 600 ml in old glass measuring cup
After kneading 1408 g
After first rising 1416 g
After "punch down" and second rising 1406 g
Formed into loaves, waiting to rise before putting in oven
Edit: After baking, 1271 g
I'm using a creaky old Ohaus dual pan balance, surplus from an industrial lab. The process is not entirely "quantitative" in chemistry terms because there are some minor gains and losses. I have to flour the kneading cloth to prevent sticking, some dough may get lost on my bowl, and so forth.
The CO2 escapes, taking C out of the bread. The water (mostly) stays, adding extra O2 into the bread. I don't know which process has the bigger impact on weight of the dough, though. Especially as the dough also dries out over time.
Probably not very much impact, as you say.
This is what I could find about their data:
"Data have been compiled from published and unpublished sources. Published data sources include the scientific literature. Unpublished data include those obtained from the food industry, other government agencies, and research conducted under contracts initiated by USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS)." (http://www.ars.usda.gov/sp2UserFiles/Place/80400525/Data/SR/... <- page 2)
This method for calculating the calorie count for fat has in my opinion allowed the demonisation of fat.
Our stomachs are imperfect at digesting globules of fat. Burning-until-gone releases much more of the energy than surface acting acids and proteinases.
Effective calorie count for fat just has to be so much lower than the listed value.
Constrast that with sugars, where the absorbtion mechanism is crystaline dissolution. Disolving crystals is an almost perfect 1-1 process
https://courses.washington.edu/conj/bess/fats/fats.html
Also, you can experience what happens when you don't digest fat by eating a good bit of Olestra.
I think its just a lot easier to eat a lot of carbs. Fats and protein make me much more saturated more quickly.
I don't think there is some magic formula.
Huh? The body is perfectly happy to burn fat. You just have to give it the right conditions. In fact, the body can get practically all its energy from fat, it's called ketosis. You can achieve a state of ketosis either through a high fat, low carb diet or fasting.
While glucose is essential for life since the brain cells die quickly without it, glucose does not have to be obtained from carbohydrates. It can be obtained from protein or fat by breaking down the protein or fat into glucose. In fact, a good percentage of protein (~50%) becomes glucose when it enters the body.
Protein is favored over many other energy forms since it contains amino acids, one of the most useful sources of nutrients to your body. Your body cannot store amino acids and yet it needs a daily intake of amino acids to survive. Additionally, protein conversion to fats is costly, so your body under normal conditions does not usually convert much of it, compared to fats and carbohydrates (carbs almost immediately undergo storage). Good fats, however, are beneficial (essential even for health) than carbohydrates in all cases.
Or perhaps someone might enlighten me why I'm wrong (at the time of this writing, my original comment has 0 points of karma).
I've cut bread and processed sugar to a large degree from my diet and stick to lean proteins like seafood and chicken, and have found myself to be quite lean and healthy (bulking even with my anterior/posterior chain, triceps/biceps). I haven't counted calories since I switched to a diet that focuses on lean protein and seafood (and I suspect there are days where I eat more than 2000 kCal).
Not true at all. The brain runs just fine on ketone bodies in the absence of dietary glucose.
The few organs that do require glucose are supplied by protein conversion (gluconeogenesis).
I too experienced a certain effortless growth of muscle mass after eating enough protein for my daily needs, too.
It's like saying that a city can absorb a terajoule of gasoline more easily than a terajoule of coal or a terajoule of lithium batteries. It's true, but "which is absorbed faster?" is a vast oversimplification of a more complicated question, which is "how much is needed?"
To extend the analogy further, if a city had mostly electric cars and a coal power plant, it would have no trouble absorbing the lithium batteries or the coal, but would have more trouble absorbing the gasoline.
500 calories from whatever source is 500 calories, when we are talking about energy. It is definitely possible for people to excrete excess calories, but if for example you are excreting a lot of fat, you will know about it. It is not pleasant. There are a fair number of people who are unfortunately misinformed and think that somehow they have super digestion for carbohydrates for example. They think they can extract 1000 calories from 500 calories of carbohydrates. This is impossible and it's why it's important to understand that from that standpoint a calorie is a calorie.
Of course nutritionally they are very different things. They are digested differently, at different speeds and metabolically burned in completely different ways. Different foods also have different nutrients and it is important to make sure that you get these nutrients. You can go an awfully long time without any symptoms being malnourished only to eventually come to a very serious problem.
So many people are (for lack of a better word) arrogant in their beliefs about nutrition. However, we still know very little about how our body works. Traditional diets have a long track history with many, many people. We have a good idea about potential nutritional problems and how to counteract them.
I was vegan for many years (although, strangely, not ethically vegan -- I just enjoy eating that kind of food). I have seen many invented diets cause serious problems and eventually I spent considerable effort to learn about traditional vegan diets. I'll caution you that the current attitude of "You can just cut out carbohydrates from your diet and be healthier" is unlikely to be true. Nutrition is complicated and can't be boiled down to something so simple. There are many shapes of diets that can be healthy but seemingly insignificant changes can take their toll on your long term health. Please exercise caution.
I have a lot of sympathy for your conservative and skeptical stance in general.
I am glad though, that a lot of people have done the self-experimenting (that we probably wouldn't do to normal experimental subjects) and gone on a low carb diet.
They seem fine.
There are also some better monitored people on a low carb diet, eg for some kids with epilepsy it's the only thing that works. The kids main problem is usually getting enough calories, but not any lack of other nutrients. (I think the go to source of extra calories is coconut oil, because the kids seem to mind that the least.)
See eg http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/magazine/21Epilepsy-t.html...
Edit: just checked the article above. Looks like they need to add multivitamins etc. Poor kid: his diet needs to be much more extreme than eg Atkins diet to keep the epilepsy at bay.
I've cut carbs out of my diet a few months ago, after I chewed through the 200-pound mark. I noticed I had trouble running, walking and even standing. I dropped bread, pasta and refined sugar, though I still eat fruits without restriction.
The result is that I've been steadily losing weight and shedding fat, primarily the nasty layers found in the pubic area.
My research has thoroughly convinced me that carbless diet makes the body burn fat and serves as a protective factor against neurodegenerative diseases.
I helped a friend of mine lose weight once. His original diet consisted of a single muffin and coffee for breakfast, a subway sandwich with iced tea and one of those tiny bags of potato chips that come with the meal, and for dinner some salad and spaghetti or something. It sounds reasonable, but for the life of him he couldn't get under 220 lbs.
We went through the numbers. The muffin he was eating was 500 calories! The chips, 150 calories. The salad dressing he was eating on his salad was over 100 calories. The ice tea was 180 calories. So that's 930 calories, or nearly 1/2 of his daily requirements in just those 4 items of food.
We made a few minor substitutions to his diet (which actually increased the volume of food he was eating) and he started running 2 miles a day with me at lunch (which is worth about 200 calories a day). He was down to 160 pounds in no time. Our biggest problem was trying to make sure he didn't lose more than 2 lbs a week because that can be hard on your liver.
The thing is, if he had gone on a no carb diet and found alternatives in his diet he probably would have had the same result. No muffin. No potato chips. No ice tea. Probably substitute the salad for something with more protein.
Like I said, I'm happy if its working for you. I know a lot of people on low carb diets. Every single one of them is overweight. I have yet to meet even a single person in real life for who this strategy has worked. Mostly I see people change their diet, lose some weight when they eat more healthily and then gain it back when they mistakenly think that as long as they keep out the dreaded carbs, then they can eat whatever the heck they like without consequences.
Carbohydrates: 5 to 15% of the energy consumed
Protein: 20 to 35%
Fats: at most 5 to 15%
Not only is the fat digestion process inefficient, but on top the fat absorbtion process consumes more energy to make happen ( that heat )
We'd have to see where in the large 5-15% ranges various items stand.
Sugar dissolving in water... I'd be amazed if that released 15% of the energy. I'm still amazed it would be as high as 5%, so thanks for that info
EDIT: spatular set me straight with a detailed process for sugar absorbtion
I think longer hydrocarbons including sugar have to be broken into fructose and glucose during digestion. Fructose cannot be immidiately consumed by cells, so it's converted into glucose in liver. On top of that, there are about 5g of glucose total in bloodstream at any given moment, so exess have to be accumulated by liver/muscle cells that have to store it in a long-chain hydrocarbon form (glycogen). Each conversion requires some energy, so 5-15% isn't that much...
Doesn't this assume that you're starving [1]? Proteins are a last resort, and since it's somewhat toxic to convert them, they're simply not processed if it can be avoided [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis "the process occurs during periods of fasting, starvation, low-carbohydrate diets, or intense exercise."
[2] http://antranik.org/the-catabolism-of-fats-and-proteins-for-...
cows can extract "enormous" amounts of protein from foods that humans wouldn't ever.
it's very hard measuring how much digestible protein something has, such as beans, or lentils, or soybeans. it depends if you eat the shell, did you blend the shell like a mad man, even if you blended beans into a homogenous phlegm
Yeah, ruminants are amazing with their cyclic puking and eating :)
I don't think the article addresses the following point. I may be totally wrong but I suspect the residues of the combustion still contain organic molecules that could possibly be broken down furthermore by some other process and release more energy (I believe it's the case with fuel, I remember a chemistry teacher telling us that burning fuel was terribly inefficient).
Would it be possible that the digestion mechanism is somehow more efficient at breaking down this molecules and produce more energy than combustion?
I pick reduced fat houmous from the fridge. The label says 100g has 256kcal (18g of fat, 13g of carbs, 8,5g of protein = 248kcal)
Are there any Polish media reports about this practice? It sounds like the kind of thing the American media would love to report about if it was happening here. (Anything that fits the basic format of "Are companies misreporting arsenic levels in your child's grape juice? Story at eleven!" is going to make a journalist here salivate.)
http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/Teach/Math//Gamow...
After the professor first discovered him he obviously could have started giving him loaves calculated to follow the fair distribution, but I'm not sure if it's possible to scale that technique.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE2lna5Wxuo
The video also deals with calorie count in restaurants. The NYC regulation to require calorie counts directly on the menu really seems like a good idea. Other than the people already knowing the rough calorie count, who checks the obscure and difficult tables on the website?
I'm not sure exactly which tables you're referring to here, but if you mean tables showing nutritional details beyond the mere number of calories: Being able to look up how many grams of carbohydrate they're consuming is a incredibly important for type 1 diabetics.
These
http://www.bk.com/pdfs/nutrition.pdf
nutrition information tables. The Burger King one actually looks quite reasonable. Compare this to the German Starbucks one:
http://globalassets.starbucks.com/assets/4145371584DF4F75A9E...
I doubt a lot of people would reconsider their choice to order a frappuccino if they knew it contains as much calories as a Big Mac.
It's good that it's so detailed, but a tl;dr version on the board would be good. It's not like the average joe opens this on their phone to compare how many calories each product has.
>Being able to look up how many grams of carbohydrate they're consuming is a incredibly important for type 1 diabetics.
Valid point
1. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/02/21/172589997/one...
Classic freedom
On the back label its says calories per serving. On the front they use a different serving size to make it seem like it's low-cal.
Like popcorn that's 140 cals/serving, but on the front it says 35 cals per cup.
http://www.foodfacts.com/ci/nutritionfacts/snack-foods/smart...
Or a pkg of 2 cupcakes is 380 cals, but they'll say 190 cals per cake (in small type). It makes you think it's 190 for the pkg of cakes.
The EU/UK, on the other hand, makes it incredibly difficult by listing things in units of 100g. Nothing like sitting in a dark movie theater trying to calculate fractions.
Not even primarily due to health/nutritional concerns. A lot of the cereals in the US are way to sweet for my taste. Haven't found a better way to figure out which isn't other than comparing contained sugar.
http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocuments...
for example cooking 100g of beans in 500g of water would result in, let's say, 450g of beanwater (beans + water). usda takes 100g of that beanwater and says it's 100g of cooked beans (water content of cooked beans is way higher than in raw beans [their tables say]).
I was worried there's not enough protein in 100g of cooked beans, but there is, it's just not 100g of cooked beans, it's 450g of beanwater.
Example: Quest bars. Their syrup would typically show 4 kcal per gram, but is actually closer to 2. Supposedly. That's how a bar can have so few calories and such good macros.
Ultimately, if you're consistent with tracking your calories and its effect on your weight, it doesn't matter if the values are off by 20, 30, or 50%. Just be consistently off by... 50%.
https://gastropod.com/the-end-of-the-calorie/
"For most of us, the calorie is just a number on the back of the packet or on the display at the gym. But what is it, exactly? And how did we end up with this one unit with which to measure our food? Is a calorie the same no matter what type of food it comes from? And is one calorie for you exactly the same as one calorie for me? To find out, we visit the special rooms scientists use to measure how many calories we burn, and the labs where researchers are discovering that the calorie is broken. And we pose the question: If not the calorie, then what?"
This is why it's real hard to stay healthy on a raw food diet.
I learned this from this book, which I really recommend:
https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human-eboo...
Keywords if you want to look it up more: TDEE, 1 pound = 3500 calories, calorie in calorie out
Your metabolism level, and the percentage of calories that are actually taken up by fat cells, depend on many factors besides total calorie count.
A nice paper that came out recently: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151119143445.h...
So, for example, person A can eat 3000 calories of cookies per day, but would gain weight on 3000 calories of rice. Person B could be the opposite. From the paper, it looks like genetics is a factor, though epigenetic factors and microbiome seem more important.
That's not at all what that paper says. It describes that blood glucose response to various foods can differ between people (and shows to extreme outliers as examples). Your interpretation with "3000 calories of cookies" vs rice is both not supported by the study, and also nonsense.
I'd look up the studies for this if I had the time, but: the actual correlation (relationship) between calories and weight gain/loss is extremely large, with the differences between most people of similar body types less than 200 calories/day.
Yes, it is well supported by the research, did you actually read it?
I actually had a nice phone call with the lab that produced this paper. You can explain a percentage of weight changes by calorie intake, but the factors that explain glucose curves (and thus uptake of calories) require far more data (like genetics, etc).
I read your link. It's about blood glucose. Not about weight. The crux of your argument is that blood glucose response equals uptake of calories, which is not supported by your link, and which is not true. If it were, you could eat 5000 calories of fat in a day, have no blood glucose response, thus not get fat.
Are you really trying to claim that the outlier participants of whom the blood glucose plots are shown in your link are unable to use any of the calories in bananas/cookies, because they had no blood glucose response?
Regardless, we can talk about metabolic pathways. If you consume carbohydrates, they eventually get dumped into your bloodstream as glucose (minus fructose, which is special). The level of glucose then absorbed into fat cells is regulated by insulin, and insulin production (while more complicated) is determined by the level of glucose in the blood.
I don't see what fat cells have anything to do with this either.
As for your rebuttal of my points, it does not seem sequent. I made the point that two individuals eating the same food will gain weight differently. You then made the very same point by linking to another paper which by the way does not support what either of us said - as it measured individuals individual glycemic responses to different foods, which is not correlated with the body's calorie intake on the food.
Here's the full paper in case you did not read it (and for others to read if they'd like): http://www.sciencedirect.com.sci-hub.cc/science/article/pii/...
As for the paper, the graphics used represent outliers. Plus they in one example compared cookies and bananas. Both which have different metabolic pathways. Fructose is handled in the liver and glucose is not. When they compared bread and glucose the difference was not quite as drastic even when comparing outliers. Therefore it seems more like it has to do with varying ability in people's bodies efficiency to metabolise fructose and glucose.
We might never have full pictures of all these questions.
[1] http://examine.com/faq/what-should-i-eat-for-weight-loss/
[2] I know specifically that this is currently being tested in some large-scale, high-cost studies. Which tells me that researchers aren't as confident as [1] makes it sound like.
As for your last question (food composition and satiety), tangentially related, in the literature regarding this it seems as if keto has a lot of support for weight loss. Not because of the way it affects your metabolism or gut bacteria, but because it does satiate people more adequately than other diets it was tested against (regular western, Scandinavian and paleo).
Noteworthy however is that with change to body composition, your TDEE (known as the amount of calories your body needs to maintain its current weight) changes. However it can easily be accounted for when losing (or gaining as may be the desired outcome for some people) in a controlled way.
Regarding the different metabolism thing: https://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-peo... (To asnwer the link's question: Yes. 600 at most calories if you compare two outliers.
You can kick a heroine habit by quitting. You can never stop eating. How successful do you imagine most junkies would be if the standard advice was "measure the amount of heroine you take per day and stay below your target".
Everything in between is affected by cumulative margin of error. There are inaccuracies when calories are calculated, then variations of portions, variations of individual metabolism and compositions of gut bacteria. If you throw the "not all calories are equal" in the mix you get even more variations.
The body isn't perfect, and will never absorb 100%. You can figure how much by measuring calories left in feces (it's very little, our digestive system does a great job).
This waste will vary slightly. Heavy processed food and sugars will be close to 100% absorption, harder to digest food can be slightly lower, but still within ~10%.
The reason we recommend lowering high fat, high carbs and sugary food to people isn't because calories are different, but because it is a lot easier to consume a huge amount of calories through those.
Think about 500 calories.. That's 1l of soda, or 2 candy bars, or one Big Mac. All of those are very easy to eat/drink mindlessly. Now compare eating 1.2kg of carrot, 2.5l of vegetable soup or 500g of rice.
Yes. There was a MIT (or something) prof that went on a mission to prove this. Ate crap junk food...but counted the calories...and lost weight.
I'm going to start referring to smartphones as "handheld computers".