> ..you can also download the food database to a handheld compUter.
I'm going to start referring to smartphones as "handheld computers".
How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)
101–110 of 156 posts
Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)
#102In Poland it's regulated, you can be off by 15%. My mate did tests in a lab. All products he picked showed 15% lower kcal value on the packaging. 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)
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?
Huh that was really interesting. Thank you, I think I might spend some time looking up more today.
Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hong Kong even restricts export of baby formula (and smugglers are regularly arrested on the border to mainland).
Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)
#104In Poland it's regulated, you can be off by 15%. My mate did tests in a lab. All products he picked showed 15% lower kcal value on the packaging. 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)
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?
>And apparently in the US you can be off by whatever you want
Classic freedom
Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)
#105This reminded me of a question I've always had... there's always a lot of mass of the food not accounted for in the Fat/Carbohydrates/Protein/Fiber. For example, a can of food that weighs 454g net might only have 150g accounted for in the nutrition facts. What's in the rest of the food, besides water?
Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)
#106I have a related question: Can the calorie count reliably predict the effect on a persons weight? Or is the amount of carbohydrates and fats much more important?
>Can the calorie count reliably predict the effect on a persons weight?
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.
Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)
#107Earlier 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...
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Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)
#108Earlier 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…
> We agonize over which brand is healthier for our cats and dogs, but it's all an illusion.
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.
Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)
#109> The original method used to determine the number of kcals in a given food directly measured the energy it produced.The food was placed in a sealed container surrounded by water--an apparatus known as a bomb calorimeter. The food was completely burned and the resulting rise in water temperature was measured. I don't think the article addresses the following point. I may be totally wrong but I suspect the residues of…
Digestion is a red herring here. It's how the nutrients are turned to energy in the cells. And that's an oxidization, just like burning but more controlled.
Re: How do food manufacturers calculate the calorie count of packaged foods? (2003)
#110> 9 Kcal/g for fat. [...] These numbers were originally determined by burning 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. C…
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.
It is of course different. Carbohydrates, protein and fat all undergo different metabolic pathways. Further down you are wondering why you might not have a high karma on this post. I think it's because what you have written conflates 2 issues (I suspect, though, that you aren't actually conflating them... just your writing is unclear).
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.