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how do they know the quantity of nutrients in foods

When you look at for example a packet of asparagus how do they know much fibre, salt & carbs are in it etc?


on a packet of asparagus I have, it says there is
<0.1g of saturated fat, I know that that is a very small amount anyway but if it's a vegetable then why is there any saturated fat in it?

don't know why but I just became randomly curious about this
but how do they like measure for protein and fibre and stuff? And why is there saturated fat in veg
Original post by Apple2017
When you look at for example a packet of asparagus how do they know much fibre, salt & carbs are in it etc?


on a packet of asparagus I have, it says there is
<0.1g of saturated fat, I know that that is a very small amount anyway but if it's a vegetable then why is there any saturated fat in it?

don't know why but I just became randomly curious about this


You know those bleach adverts that say 'kills 99.9% of bacteria'
I think it's like that - the bleach probably kills 100% of bacteria but it's not possible to prove it... but it's relatively easy to prove that it reliably kills 999 out of 1000 bacteria

similarly there's probably zero saturated fat in that asparagus to any reasonable definition but they can't say zero - just one molecule in there and it's not zero any more. However it's (probably) quite easy to reliably determine that the saturated fat content is zero using a method with +/- 0.1 g precision.

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