How do scientists calculate nutritional values in food?

[jrazmuffin]

I have a biology project due tomorrow that me and my two friends have been working on this weekend and we need to know how scientists calculate nutritional values and what tests they conduct to get those values.

[deleted-71417]

Hi,

Here is a Science Buddies project on how to measure how much energy is contained in food:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p012.shtml

If you are interested in techniques of how to measure the nutritional content of food in detail, it is a very big subject. Here is a survey article on the subject:

ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/006/y5022e/y5022e00.pdf


If you just want to know the nutritional content of specific foods, try a google search for “nutritional analysis”. You will find links to lots of tables of nutritional values of lots of foods. If you are looking for vitamin and mineral contents of foods, Science Buddies has a project to measure vitamin C:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p044.shtml

There are more complicated techniques to measure other vitamins and minerals which can be found using Google searches. You can get a whole college degree in the study of this subject, and find lots of books about it.

Hope this gets you started on a good answer.

Good luck!

Barrett L Tomlinson