In my quest to lose a few pounds, I have found that one of the best motivators for me is to enforce a rule that I must keep track of the caloric content of every single thing I put in my mouth. I keep it in a notebook, and by the end of the day I have to confront the total, good or bad. It keeps me honest.
It also makes me wonder about the accuracy of nutritional information (and especially caloric totals) on product packaging. Food companies have obvious incentives to skew the results, which might be possible by choosing certain testing methods, or assuming that the buyer won’t tilt the bag of chips up in order to let all remaining greasy crumbs slide into his mouth, or by simply fudging the data and hoping they don’t get caught.
Does anyone know the extent to which we can depend on the information published on the packaging? I know the information is there because of government regulation, but is there any governmental testing to ensure accuracy?
A recent study (from Canada?) showed that up to 25% of food labels were inaccurate.
Personally, I was pleased that it was so low. The companies have little incentive for being honest.
Recently I discovered that companies, at least in the US, can put “0 grams of <whatever>” if they have less than one gram of that particular whatever per serving, and the same with calories. So those little packets of Splenda and Nutra-Sweet can say they have 0 grams of carbohydrates and 0 calories per serving, even though the vast majority of the contents of the packets is pure sugar.
Evidently the spray butter that claims to be “0 grams of fat and 0 calories” does the same thing.
To be more precise, companies can round down to 0 if they have less than 0.5 of the item in question.
I question whether Splenda or Nutra-Sweet have any sugar, defined as sucrose, in them at all. First, it would defeat the entire purpose of the items, and second, even that amount of sugar would have noticeable calories.
Look on the ingredients label, it’s right there. They fill the packets, and pretty much every other form of Splenda/Nutra-Sweet that is meant to be used as a direct sugar substitute by the consumer, with dextrose (which is the dextro- isomer of glucose, about as sugary as sugar gets) and maltodextrin, another sugary carbohydrate, for “bulk.” You can buy pure sucralose in a water solution instead, but it’s pretty expensive and you have to specially order it from the Internet at special intervals of once every few months; the stuff they sell in grocery stores is mostly sugar with a bit of sucralose or aspartame to make it more like sucrose.
It’s not the calories that concern me, personally, it’s the tooth decay – one experiment showed that the contents of Splenda packets do lower your tooth pH significantly, while not quite as much as pure sucrose.
… dextrose IS glucose in the way the general public would understand it (it’s the version our body can use). “Natural sugars are D, natural aAs are L.” Other aliases include “inverted sugar”.
Maltodextrin is partially-hydrolized polycarbohydrates (this last nasty word being what most people mean by “carbs”). Picture it like this: a “carb” is a digestible branched swirl of 10000 rings of glucose, “sugar” is two rings of glucose, “maltodextrin” is a mixture of swirls of less-than-10000 rings and of the rings that have been loosened by a chemical digestion. Most “slimming shakes” are mostly maltodextrin, sort of like done-till-they-get-liquid noodles with added minerals and vitamins (sometimes, the forms of two or more minerals are incompatible with each other, meaning that you actually get less mineral than the theoretical content).
Glucose is sweeter than “sugar”, so using glucose as a sweetener requires less sweetener.
The number 10000 has been picked out of a hat.
From experiments conducted every year in my college, the information is decently accurate but woefully incomplete, since it only indicates what the government says it has to indicate. 100g of L-glicine don’t have the same nutritional value as 100g of varied L-aAs nor the same as 100g of *-glicine, yet all would be listed as “100g protein.”
And, of course, a bunch of packets with 0.5 grams of dextrose will do a lot more damage to your teeth than a bunch of packets with nothing but sucralose in them.
Thanks for clarifying what maltodextrin is. That’s a lot clearer than what I’d seen before.
Do nutritional labels just calculate the food’s individual ingredients’ nutritional facts and all them all together to come up with the actual nutrtional label information, or do they take the final food product and analyze that (calorimeter I suppose?) to get the final nutritional facts? I assume some cooking methods would alter some of the individual components’ nutritional facts…