how do people know how many calories is in something?

Question

as in apples, sugars, organic products

Answer 1

Do you mean how do the maker's of a certain product estimate how many calorie's are in that product? To determine the number of calories contained in these building blocks, however, food labs rely on conversion factors first assembled more than 100 years ago by the agricultural chemist Wilbur O. Atwater, who literally did burn things like beef and corn in a device called the "bomb calorimeter." While today's calorimeters look a lot more sophisticated, Atwater's was more or less a fireproof container sheathed in water and hooked up to a thermometer. He used it, along with a larger device capable of measuring the heat output of an active person, to figure out how much usable energy different foods possess. The idea is that burning, say, a hamburger shows the total energy that hamburger contains, but it doesn't account for what the human body cannot absorb, nor what is used in the digestive process. So Atwater derived a set of tables that specify the practical energy values of different foods, distinguishing, for example, among different sources of protein. The most recent update to the conversion tables was published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1973.

Answer 2

How any calories something contains is the sum of each ingredients own calories. Sugar is known to have __ amount of calories per teaspoon and so on. Though I do not know the method to come to this conclusion.

Answer 3

I joined sparkpeople.com and now enter all the food/drink I consume into a nutrition plan. It spells out the calories in each item and even shows carbs, fat, protein, etc. It is awesome! It was quite a wake up call to see what I was actually consuming on a daily basis (and still am). The site also has exercise/diet tips/plans etc.

Answer 4

Most people look it up on the web or have a book that lists the calorie count of popular foods at home.

Answer 5

Look at the nutrition label. There is software out there too that have a data base of foods nutrition content

Answer 6

its easy all you have to do is look on the back of the box or container of the food you want to know the cals of. then somewhere there you should find "calories per serving " then the number next to that is the number of cals 100-300 is good depending on what food more filling more cals.

Answer 7

Do you mean how they measure calories or how they find out the calories on packaged food. To measure calories they burn the food and measure how much energy comes out of it.

Answer 8

Look for a book that lists calories in foods.

Answer 9

Read the label or buy a book of calories.

Answer 10

calories are essentially a source of energy. It's like the ammount of energy needed to raise a liter of water one degree celsius(I think). You can find it by burning it.