TIL that there’s an allowed 20% margin of error in accuracy per the FDA.
That seems way bigger than it needs to be …
We can’t even measure calories accurately, never mind predicting how much your specific body will actually absorb. Maybe we could be more accurate with vitamins and stuff, but I dunno.
The only way to get an accurate reading on calorie count is to burn it. 1 kilocalorie (nutritional calorie) can increase the temperature of 1kg of water by 1 C°
But burning isn’t how your body utilizes the calories. Some things burn just fine yet are entirely useless as a (human) food source, like wood. This complicates things.
For instance, we still don’t know if our bodies can actually use ethanol (drinking alcohol) as a fuel source. Is that vodka shot adding to your daily calorie intake?
Vodka’s back on the menu, boys!
It was off the menu?
Even more reason there is plenty of science to be discovered. Until then, the rough estimate we have is still proven to work (calories consumed minus calories burned).
Sure, but that is measuring calorie content, not what your body can absorb
Exactly, which makes the whole endeavour more of a guessing game than a science.
I think using trial and error to see what works for your body is a pretty scientific approach
I mean there’s no way that they’re gonna be able to do metrics for every person since every person is built differently so there has to be a common standard. Or you you saying that certain types of calories are burned the same way for all people?
I’m just saying it’s not that simple.
What? Calorie is a perfectly accurate method of measurement. Just because your body might absorb more or less than the next person doesn’t change the amount of calories in a food.
Measuring calories in food is not accurate. Measuring calories by burning fuel is, but that’s not how we use food.
Lmao so measuring calories in food isn’t accurate cause you don’t consider it food when measured?
That’s gotta be the funniest counter argument I’ve ever heard
I think he’s saying that you can measure how much energy the food contains but not how much energy each individual will successfully absorb and metabolize.
Nah, that’s the funniest attempt at dissing someone that said something you don’t understand I’ve ever seen.
Calorimeters do a specific job. That job is not the same as digestion and metabolism. Not all foods “give up” calories in the same way, and no foods do so in the same way as inside a calorimeter.
Measured calories via calorimeter are indeed accurate with exactly what they measure, i.e. The exact food that is placed into them.
What a calorimeter can’t do is guarantee that everything put into it is the same.
The more complex the substance is, the more variation there will be between measurements of different batches of that substance. Something like refined sugar is going to give the same results reliably because there’s just not that much variation. Same with refined fats and proteins. Once you get simple enough, the results vary by so little as the be meaningless.
Put two bananas in the same machine, the variance will be greater than that of simpler materials. Is that variance enough to matter on a practical level? Not usually, but it can be.
But, that variance is still there, and the range of possibilities is enough to be significant when calculating what you might slap on a nutritional level of a given food.
Hence, the results aren’t accurate in the sense that they can be reproduced in a precise way. There’s just too much natural variance in foods, even carefully prepared foods.
While what you said isn’t wrong, it’s not really the main issue. The energy a human body gets from food can be vastly different than what is produced by burning it, and there are further variations per person.
The calorie count on food to my knowledge is based on actual measurements with humans… from one guy doing experiments in the 1800s. And while it’s probably reasonably accurate on average, it’s not really possible to know how much energy a specific person will get from a food from a generalized calorie label. So even if the food itself had no variance, it would be impossible to label the energy intake you will get from it accurately.
For highly processed foods, I agree.
But for relatively unprocessed foods, seems completely reasonable to me at first glance. The relative sugar content of, say, an apple, is dependent on all sorts of parameters (sun, water, soil…). The gluten content of wheat, iron content of vegetables, all of these things are variable. The more “natural” a food is, the higher the variability (as opposed to, say, artificial candy — that should be pretty uniform).
Fun fact: the FDA also has limits on how many rodent hairs, insect parts, mold and so forth can be in food. The limit is not zero.
And that limit wouldn’t be possible to be zero. We don’t live in a sterile vacuum so I’m good with it
We don’t live in a sterile vacuum
Speak for yourself, buddy!
Of course the hippie lives in a sterile environment.
With lots of herring and Dane axes, of course 😉
I already knew this stuff, the idea that everything needs to be bleached clean is stupid, even when it comes to food.
Insects are just extra protein! Nom!
Why doesn’t the FDA require companies to put a range instead of an exact number then?
There are these chicken bites that advertise “high in protein!” on the pack, then you look and see it’s 9 grams…
Like, how do you make chicken bites have only 9 grams of protein??
They’re actively trying to remove protein from the chicken to make it that low.
Easy, 5% chicken and the 95% is bread and other garbage. There is “chicken” in there somewhere
“Chicken substitute”
Chimkin
It’s probably ground up tendons and shit. Technically chicken but not protein.
More honest answer, it’s generally breast meat but loaded up with binding agents, salt, and water. It’s pretty obvious with the worse ones when you even slightly overcook them, and the chicken practically vanishes from inside the nugget because the water has evaporated.
Probably even literal shit. LMFAO
What is the serving size?
Without knowing that, it’s impossible to make a judgment about how “high” the protein is.OC is probably from an EU county where everything has to normalized to p. 100g because everything else is just insane.
hen you look and see it’s 9 grams…
Like, how do you make chicken bites have only 9 grams of protein??
It’s not actual chicken, that’s how.
The same goes for eu food labels.
It makes sense though. Say you claim there’s 10g per 100g of something in your product. Any random scoop of 100g is not always equal. The 20% range means that any random scoop of 100grams must contain between 12 and 8 grams of something.
Due to personell shortages, this will obviously not be tested enough. But ideally it is and when an average of a dundred tests comes out at something other that 10grams per 100 gram, than they’ll have to change it. I gues… I’m don’t know the procedures.
(Tolerancetable on page 7)
Here’s an the eu regulation on food labels. Vitamins and minerals even have a lowerbound of 50 % and an upperboud of 35% and 45% respectively.
Somehow “8 or 12” sounds a lot better than “20% variance”
Statistically, it will average out, unless they use the margin to actively use cheaper ingredients
I think we all know that if the numbers can be fudged they will be.
I don’t know if people look that closely at the nutritional values that it if worth it to manipulate them for advertising. I think the bigger effect is that they don’t have to quality check that hard and can have a little more of this or that. Producing consistently is hard. But maybe it’s a little bit of both.
And this is another reason why avoiding packaged food is best.
Well, that’s kinda besides the point right? The composition of “natural” food has huge variation. There is no “nutritional content of a banana.” There’s the nutritional content of this banana, of that banana, of an unripe banana, of a ripe banana, of an overripe banana…but these can be hugely different. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8266066/
Yea I love when my food rots 3 days after I purchase it.
If you’re so nutritionally conscious as to track macros, why are you eating processed food?
“No one is allowed a cookie if they track macros!” >:0
I mean, just eat the occasional cookie. Don’t worry about the macros in it. Tracking macros is never going to be precise but you can get a general idea if you’re getting the right amounts. But, if you’re getting most or a lot of your nutrition from processed food, you’re probably tracking the wrong thing.
I get it, just exaggerating to point out that no one is perfect and has time to make all their own food
Unless it’s meat from a butcher or produce, it has a nutritional label.
