I was just looking up the nutritional info on a 4oz hot dog. It said that the fat, protein and carbs added up to about 53 grams. 4oz is about 112g. What is the other 59 grams?
Thanks,
Rob
Mostly water.
Undigestible fiber?
mmm
Yes, mostly water. For other foods like vegetables there could be some fiber in there.
For a hot dog there’s an appreciable weight of salt. According to the nutrition information for a random 4oz hot dog there’s 1.4 grams of sodium which means about another 2.1 grams of chloride. So 3.5 grams of salt.
Almost entirely water, as mentioned above. In the case of a hot dog, the difference is more than 98% explained by water. See the nutrient data on a typical uncooked hot dog here where you will find that it is about 54% water.
The most common type of fiber, cellulose, is a type of carbohydrate and is included under the carbohydrate heading on US nutrition labels even though humans cannot extract calories from it. Some types of fiber are not chemically carbohydrates (lignin and some gums like guar gum). I’m not sure how they’re handled on nutrient labels.
Ash is a minor component of most foods. It’s what’s left over after all the organic material is burned off. It is composed mostly of minerals including salt.
Not hot dogs, but some foods contain ethyl alcohol (the kind that gets you drunk) but it’s not usually listed on nutrient labels. Ethyl alcohol has about 7 kilocalories per gram. Some foods contain the so-called sugar alcohols including glycerol and xylitol, which are chemically alcohols (though not the kind that can get you drunk). They are included under the carbohydrate heading of US nutrient labels (even though they’re not chemically carbohydrates) because they’re sweet and are metabolized somewhat like carbohydrates and have a similar calorie content per gram.
Water, of course. I should have realized that.
Thanks
Rat hairs.
OK, I’m going, you don’t have to shove.
Rat turds weigh more. (that’s not a caper! :eek:)
Nah, rat hair is mostly protein.
As is the hog anus.
But is it assimilable prot…what am I saying? :smack:
Their nutritional content, of course, depends on the rat’s diet. Ironic if it’s hot dogs.
Ironic, but not surprising, given that the rat in question lives in a hot dog factory.
Just as ironic if it’s capers!
The USDA nutritional database includes water content. For Frankfurter, pork everything listed as content per 100 g still doesn’t add up to 100 g though.
Off the top of my head, it looks like “minerals” is excluding the mass of all the stuff that is typically chemically bound to phosphorus. You don’t have any free atomic phosphorus in your body, rather it’s all some kind of phosphate (whether it’s phosphate, pyrophosphate, attached to another molecule, etc.) Atomic mass of phosphorus is 30 g/mol, while phosphate is 95 g/mol. That probably accounts for another few hundred mg.
Then there are all sorts of small molecules that aren’t strictly a carbohydrate in the sense of being a sugar or sugar polymer, or a protein, or a lipid. However, I don’t know how these are accounted for in a typical nutritional analysis. E.g. nucleotides consist of a nitrogenous base, which contains carbon, nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, arranged in one or two rings, a sugar, and a di- or triphosphate.
Whether or not it’s constituent parts are counted as “carbohydrate”, “other”, or “phosphorus” depends on the gory details of the biochemical tests used to measure each.
From what I know about measuring protein concentration, there are a lot of very different assays that often give different results. Because “protein” is a huge gemisch of very chemically different things, it’s easier to measure (say) the reduction of Cu++ by peptide bonds, certain amino acid side chains, and various other molecules in a sample. Different methods can disagree by a few percent even in ideal cases, and by far more in more difficult cases.
The missing .0001g is the soul. ::cue angelic chorus::
Somewhat. I haven’t been confined to a seat on the pot for most of a day from metabolizing pasta, bread or sugar.