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How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)

scientificamerican.com

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Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)

#81

Post by projektfu »

mysterypie wrote: post #16
cma wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The protein test was famously faked with melamine in the Chinese dog-food scandal that killed dogs and resulted in a recall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls

I was following that case closely back in 2007 because of my pet (thankfully not affected). An astonishing thing I learned was that practically every brand of cat food and dog food in North America is/was manufactured by a single company called Menu Foods in Streetsville, Ontario, Canada. The pet food "brands" don't have their own factories. They all contract it out to the same place. A few journalists remarked on th…

I am a veterinarian with an interest in nutrition. While it is true that the vast majority of the brands are virtual brands who have another manufacturer making their food, it is not true for the three brands you have mentioned whose owners sell most of the food sold. Purina (Nestle), Iams (Mars) and Royal Canin (Mars) manufacture their own food, as does Hill's (Colgate-Palmolive) and Pedigree (Mars). Mars, Nestle and Colgate-Palmolive represent over 80% of the market share in pet food. [1]

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/Euromonitor/state-of-the-pet-care-...

Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)

#82

Post by lukeschlather »

snewk wrote: post #59
jasonjei wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. 500 calories from chicken or a lean protein like crab is very different from 500 calories from a pastry. What should be highlighted is amount of sugar and carbohydrates, not total calories. Not every calorie is created equally. In fact, you could almost remove carbohydrates from your diet and be unaffected, but the same isn't true of protein and good fats.

i don't understand why your comment scores so low. It's pretty clear that our bodies will absorb 500 sugar/carbohydrate calories much more quickly than 500 protein/fat calories. You will get a much greater insulin response when eating a pastry than a chicken breast.

It's a function of diet and exercise. "Absorb" also begs the question "for what?" Your body can absorb protein and repurpose it into other proteins for muscles or whatnot, but turning that protein into energy is harder.

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.

Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)

#83

Post by powertower »

z3t4 wrote: post #77
lostlogin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same cheat was used in milk in China in '08. Baby formula was effected and babies died. Many companies were doing it and something like 50,000 babies were hospitalised. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

Considering how cheap protein is, you must be the greediest person ever to fake baby formula.

Also this is interesting... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil

Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)

#84

Post by yrro »

ng12 wrote: post #25
ourmandave wrote: post #15

Depends on what side of the package you're reading. 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 ma…

But they also list servings per package. As someone who relies on this information out of medical necessity I've never felt it to be that confusing. 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.

IME foods will state values per 100g as well as values per typical serving.

Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)

#85

Post by sukilot »

spoofball wrote: post #69
mysterypie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was following that case closely back in 2007 because of my pet (thankfully not affected). An astonishing thing I learned was that practically every brand of cat food and dog food in North America is/was manufactured by a single company called Menu Foods in Streetsville, Ontario, Canada. The pet food "brands" don't have their own factories. They all contract it out to the same place. A few journalists remarked on th…

the majority of pet food is meat not fit for human consumption. [1] 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...

People like fancy food. That doesn't make non-fancy food extreme crap.

Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)

#86

Post by sukilot »

z3t4 wrote: post #77
lostlogin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same cheat was used in milk in China in '08. Baby formula was effected and babies died. Many companies were doing it and something like 50,000 babies were hospitalised. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

Considering how cheap protein is, you must be the greediest person ever to fake baby formula.

Are these Chinese companies getting rich, or just getting by? Quality food is expense.

Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)

#87

Post by thesimon »

cperciva wrote: post #39
thesimon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And apparently in the US you can be off by whatever you want 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?

who checks the obscure and difficult tables 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.

>I'm not sure exactly which tables you're referring to here,

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

Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)

#88

Post by Scarblac »

Someone wrote: post #17
cma wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The protein test was famously faked with melamine in the Chinese dog-food scandal that killed dogs and resulted in a recall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls

The linked-to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal was way more scandalous. 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…

This scandal is the reason Dutch supermarkets still limit the amount of baby formula that can be bought per customer, so many Chinese trying to buy up large amounts that there was a risk many stores would run out.

Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)

#89

Post by sukilot »

chris_va wrote: post #18
alexbock wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would have to be very confident in the accuracy of your measurements to throw away your margin of error like that. If you report values 13% lower to try to appeal to consumers and your lab numbers are off by 3%, now you're wrong by over 15% and you're going to have a problem (if anyone even notices, or cares). Are there any Polish media reports about this practice? It sounds like the kind of thing the American me…

Kind of reminds me of this story: http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/Teach/Math//Gamow...

There's a book with an apocryphal story about how a coin maker was a accused of cheating because his gold coins had excessive standard error, before the discovery of standard deviation.

Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)

#90

Post by sukilot »

alexbock wrote: post #22
chris_va wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of reminds me of this story: http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/Teach/Math//Gamow...

Would it be possible for the baker to distribute bread to customers in such a way that the weight appears to follow a fair curve for any one customer, but is still unfair if all loaves for all customers were analyzed in aggregate? (something like Simpson's paradox?) 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 i…

A bread loaf is discrete . Use the same fractional unit rounding technique from Superman II / Office Space.
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