Food Energy - Nutrition Labels

Nutrition Labels

Many governments require food manufacturers to label the energy content of their products, to help consumers control their energy intake. In the European Union, manufacturers of packaged food must label the nutritional energy of their products in both kilocalories and kilojoules, when required. In the United States, the equivalent mandatory labels display only "Calories", often as a substitute for the name of the quantity being measured, food energy; an additional kilojoules figure is optional and is rarely used. The energy content of food is usually given on labels for 100 g, for a typical serving size (according to the manufacturer), and/or for the entire pack contents. A paper published in 2011 by the American Journal of Public Health proposed to also display the time needed to burn the food energy contained in the product by running. This would indicate how much exercise would be necessary if the food would bring the person's energy intake above what is necessary for that day.

The amount of food energy associated with a particular food could be measured by completely burning the dried food in a bomb calorimeter, a method known as direct calorimetry. However, the values given on food labels are not determined in this way. The reason for this is that direct calorimetry also burns the indigestible dietary fiber, and so does not allow for fecal losses (i.e. the fact that not all food eaten is actually absorbed by the body); thus direct calorimetry would give systematic overestimates of the amount of fuel that actually enters the blood through digestion. What are used instead are standardized chemical tests or an analysis of the recipe using reference tables for common ingredients to estimate the product's digestible constituents (protein, carbohydrate, fat, etc.). These results are then converted into an equivalent energy value based on the following standardized table of energy densities.

All the other nutrients in food are noncaloric and are thus not counted.