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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – A study was recently published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association showing that foods sold in popular restaurant chains and grocery stores contained more calories than advertised. This began the usual firestorm about companies trying to defraud the public and finger pointing about why Americans are getting fat. The implication being that the public shouldn’t trust the food labels they read.
Critics said the nutrition information was useless, misleading and confusing to consumers and should be abandoned. In the nutrition community the information elicited a big yawn. It has long been documented that many nutrition analyses are inaccurate. Note I said inaccurate not incorrect. The idea that food analysis can be precise is an illusion.
Nutrition analysis is a best guess, based on evidence, and the values that are arrived at are good for almost every application. As someone who has tracked nutrition analysis information for a living, in order to write a nutrition counter book series for a major publisher, I have never come across a food company or a restaurant chain that deliberately tried to mislead their customers. Errors that are made are often simply human mistakes, a typo that no one caught, or incorrect information accidentally entered into an analysis. When these errors are caught they are quickly fixed.
Nutrition analysis is not an exact science. Food is a variable that cannot be totally controlled.
Food is grown. Soil varies. Climate varies. Growing seasons are unusually hot or cold. All of these situations will slightly alter the nutrition profile of lettuce grown in California, oranges from Florida or potatoes from Long Island. If the produce is fresh and nutrition labeled, the company is probably using USDA nutrient values to provide label information. This information is correct for strawberries, in general, but may not be spot-on for the specific basket of strawberries you are buying in the supermarket.
Will the values be totally off? Not at all. All strawberries are excellent sources of vitamin C and fiber, and low in calories. But, depending on the growing variables the vitamin C could be a slightly higher or lower in each harvest. The strawberries, however, will never grow without any vitamin C. So you can be confident that the nutrition label displayed on the basket is a reflection of the nutrient value of strawberries.
When it comes to brand name foods or restaurant menu items, again, many things can affect the final nutrition analysis. First, was the actual food sent to a laboratory for analysis or was the analysis done by a computer program?
If an actual food sample is shipped to a lab for analysis, the laboratory equipment, or the people doing the measuring, may produce a slightly different result from lab to lab. The lab analysis can only reflect the nutrients found in the food sample provided. The company or restaurant will then use the same standardized recipe to produce additional food products. Once again, all of these foods will be similar but not an exact duplicate of one another.
Lab analysis for calories requires that the food be burned in a closed space and the amount of heat generated will equal the calorie value of that food. Though this lab method is the most accurate way to determine the calories in, for example, a can of soup, it may not translate exactly to the way food is burned for energy in your body. It will be similar but not exactly the same.
A less costly and quicker way to analyze food is to use a computer program which lists the values of individual ingredients to add up the nutrients found in a recipe. The company supplies a standardized recipe and the ingredients are analyzed by the computer. The accuracy of the analysis will depend on the skill of the person entering the data. If a recipe calls for 1 cup of chopped tomato but 1 whole tomato is entered, these are not exactly equal. If a food is deep fat fried, you must consider the fat absorbed in the cooking process in addition to the ingredients in the recipe. When a cake is cooked it loses moisture. The unbaked batter may weight 42 ounces but the baked cake weighs 36 ounces. A slice of the baked cake will have a different nutrient profile than a portion of the batter before baking. All of these variables need to be considered in the analysis.
Now you see why nutrition professionals were not the least bit surprised by the results of the recent study. Food is variable, so the results on any analysis will have slight differences.
Does that mean all values on nutrition labels and posted in restaurants are meaningless? Absolutely not. Consider these values as guides. They will tell you which foods are high in calories, high in fat, and high in sodium. Knowing this will guide you to make better choices.
Values, even faulty ones, do have value. They let you know that the muffin you are considering has 750 calories or the frozen dinner has 450 milligrams of sodium. This is valuable information, even if it is imperfect. It is far better than not having a clue about what is in the food you are eating.
© NRH Nutrition Consultants, Inc.
Jo-Ann Heslin, MA, RD, CDN is a registered dietitian and the author of the nutrition counter series for Pocket Books with 12 current titles and sales in excess of 8 million books. The books are widely available at your local or on-line bookseller.
Current titles include:
The Calorie Counter, 5th Ed., 2010
The Ultimate Carbohydrate Counter, 3rd Ed., 2010
The Complete Food Counter, 3rd ed., 2009
The Fat Counter, 7th ed., 2009
The Healthy Wholefoods Counter, 2008
The Cholesterol Counter, 7th Ed., 2008
The Diabetes Carbohydrate and Calorie Counter, 3rd Ed., 2007
For more information on Jo-Ann and her books, go to The Nutrition Experts
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