How do food producers measure the exact amount of carbs, proteins, vitamins etc. in a piece of food?

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How do food producers measure the exact amount of carbs, proteins, vitamins etc. in a piece of food?

In: Biology

16 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Correct me if I’m wrong but as far as I now some of them don’t even really measure it.

They use so called look up tables and basically estimate the amount of callories, carbs etc. based on the type of food.

Just google for look up callorie / carb etc table.

Edit: spelling

Anonymous 0 Comments

Calories are just a measure of heat energy, so the caloric content of your food is really just how hot/long a standard mass of food can burn.

So how do you measure that? You put a piece of it in a device called a [“bomb calorimeter”](https://study.com/academy/lesson/bomb-calorimeter-definition-equation-example.html) and then heat it up and measure how much energy it outputs – literally just “this piece of cake burns hotter than an equally-sized piece of potato”.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Also, keep in mind that food is made up of carbs, protein, and fat. Those three things determine how many calories are in your food.

1 gram of carb = 4 calories /
1 gram of protein = 4 calories /
1 gram of fat = 9 calories

So, you add/multiply carbsx4 + gramsx4 + fatx9, you should get the calorie count for your serving of food. If you are looking at your label and it doesn’t add up, then you probably shouldn’t eat that food. They are lying about something.

This is how it was explained to me by a nutritionist and may be an over simplified way of how things really work.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They don’t. Rather, they give you an average per mass that is derived from testing. Testing could be mass spectrometer, burning the food and recording the temperature change, etc. Carbs and Proteins have 4 kilocalories per gram and fat has 9 kilocalories per gram.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are several different tests that can be done to measure these nutrients. I would have to look at my reference material to see what tests are done for each nutrient, but for example protein is measured by isolating the nitrogen in the sample and doing some math based on how much nitrogen is in protein. I believe protein is approximately 15% by weight for nitrogen if memory serves. There is a chemical that caused some controversy in the food industry was used to artificially elevate the amount of protein in the food. This chemical whose name escapes me is approximately 80% nitrogen by weight so it would drastically increase the amount of protein in the dood. If people are interested enough I can dig out my food analysis material and post what test is done for each nutrient.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I work in a lab that does this analysis. Basically the manufacturers send us their food products and we carry out the testing based on the nutrition facts they want. The lab uses different analysers for different components, including the amount of vitamins.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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