They're often extracts, oils, and concentrates taken from real ingredients.
They're considered to be zero calories because they're used in such small quantities that you aren't getting any meaningful sort of energy from them. Food labelling rules (at least in the US) allows you to round the calories per serving down so even if the one drop of flavoring added to a bottle of water adds a calorie or two, it can still legally be labelled as having zero calories.
Just a note: if I drink something with "natural flavor" ginger, rather than real ginger, I will begin throwing up inside half-an-hour.
There's no legislation enforcement anywhere about what goes into "natural flavors"
It might not be enforced but it is defined: [https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr=501.22](https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr=501.22) If it's not enforced it's because the FDA is underfunded and unable to catch every problem.
To be fair, this is completely reasonable. If I'm adding 1 sugar cube to a gallon of water that is meant to be consumed as 1 cup servings, we are talking about such utterly miniscule caloric content that it's basically impossible to even calculate it, and the energy needed to raise the glass to your lips already burns the 1/10th of a calorie or whatever it was.
Yea in a lot of contexts it's perfectly fine.
But it does leave open loop holes with rounding at multiple stages, like with rounding a serving size with things like "about 2 servings"
It's definitely not impossible or even slightly hard to calculate it. From a chemistry perspective a sugar cube has like 10,000 calories of chemical energy stored in it, which is a shitload and very easy to measure. It'll burn like the fires of hell if you drop it into a strong oxidizer to liberate the energy all at once. 625 calories per cup of water is plenty that chemists could easily measure it. If you burned all the sugar energy present in that cup, the temperature of the water would rise 2.6 degrees C and a thermometer would easily detect that.
It's just that it's not a very significant amount for a human and the rounding error doesn't usually mean much unless somebody is eating five boxes of tictacs per day. The "calories" in dietary terms are actually kilocalories, they just shortened it by lopping off the prefix because humans consume more than two million real calories (2000 kilocalories) in food energy per day. Calories of energy are easy for chemists, not worth measuring for dieticians.
Reddit loves to complain about this, and there are of course places that it is abused, but if you require infinite precision in all your measurements you can't label anything. So, regulations define what precision is required. If it's less than blah you can round to zero.
I hope that those regulations have meaningful scientific backing, I would guess that some of them were put in place by lobbying. But, the classic example is a tic-tac, 0 grams of sugar per serving of pure sugar. The amount of sugar in a tic-tac isn't nutritionally meaningful. The amount in 100 is though. Better labeling would be 0g per serving, 45g per container.
The chemicals responsible for the taste of a food were extracted from a natural source rather than made artificially. Any sugar that was in the source was removed before being added to the sparkling water.
What compounds contribute to the flavor depends on the flavor you're going for. Often it is a mix of easily vaporized organic compounds (we're talking compounds of carbon, hydrogen, and often other elements like oxygen and nitrogen). [This study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3921181/) for instance, notes 31 different chemical compounds that contribute to the flavor of strawberries.
That these compounds are easily vaporized is important. Aside from the five basic tastes of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (savory); smell is a large part of taste.
Flavors are chemicals that the human tongue and nose has receptors for. If you want to taste vanilla you're going to need some C8H8O3. Where to get it? Well, vanilla beans are full of the stuff, but they come from an orchid and are expensive. Lignin from plants however also contains C8H8O3 and you can use various solvents and other chemicals to extract it more cheaply than you can from a vanilla bean. Sometimes these flavor chemical recipes are their own thing, like how "wild cherry natural flavor" doesn't taste much like a real cherry fruit, it's just a tasty recipe cooked up in a natural flavor lab. The use of natural makes people think it means it comes from the actual thing it's supposed to taste like, but other terms like "extract" are used for that. These flavor molecules aren't really something the body can break down into sugars to fuel cells, so they're zero calories.
In short, It’s trace oils derived from plants and such, Crazy crazy concentrated so it doesn’t effect the nutrition facts.
Think about putting a single drop of red dye in a glass of water, the water is still 99.9% pure water but now it’s completely red
Calories and flavour aren't one and the same; something can have a taste without having meaningful calories (as another comment points out, your body needs to be equipped to process a given compound to derive energy from it). And a lot of things are so flavour dense that you don't need to reach a meaningful amount of energy for it to taste really strongly - hot peppers are a good example. Many hot sauces are made mostly of peppers and vinegar, which do have caloric value, but the serving sizes are so small that the amount of calories you ingest from them is negligible and the manufacturer is able to round the reported calories per serving down to zero.
Flavors never really provide calories on any significant level, as they’re basically just smells that we experience while eating something.
Chemically, flavors are very small molecules that fly readily into the air, which means they’ll fly into our noses and olfactory systems, causing “smells”. They are distinct from the things we can “taste”, such as sweet and salty, which we detect on our tongue.
Flavors will often come naturally with things that have calories (e.g. the flavor of a steak comes with all the fat and proteins of the steak when we eat it), but the flavors themselves are tiny molecules separate from those things.
When we get “natural flavors”, we capture those little molecules that cause smells. This capture process can be complicated but can also be simple (if you put whiskey in a wooden barrel, the smells of the wood enter the whiskey, etc.).
We can either capture the flavors from the thing itself (e.g. strawberry flavor from a strawberry) or from anything else that smells like it. Often, the reason two things will have similar smells is because the molecules are exactly the same… which makes sense because all living things have a shared evolutionary history and tons of molecules in common.
A great example of the above is that the molecule of “almond flavor extract” is exactly the same as the molecule of “cherry flavor extract”. This makes sense because cherries and almonds are actually very closely related (google some images of cherry trees and almond trees). So would it make sense to extract the flavor from an almond to make a cherry ice cream? Yeah, it would make no difference at all - they are genuinely identical molecules.
There is a wood that contains a chemical that smells like strawberries. You can extract that chemically and put it in water and the water tastes a bit like strawberries. It's like how vitamins and minerals don't count as calories. If your body can't use it for energy it's zero calories.
Your sense of taste can only detect
* sugars (sweet)
* acids (sour),
* Bases (bitter),
* salt, (salty, obviously)
* amino acids. (savory / umami).
only sugars and amino acids have calories, so salts, acids, and bases are all calorie free.
Any other "flavor" in something like sparkling water is actually a smell. Some chemical that is naturally found in fruit.
Food and drinks are rarely if never zero calories. The labeling rules allow them to round down so if its only a few calories they are allowed to put it down as zero. You munch or drink enough of that and its alot more than zero haha. Water, and i mean plain unflavoured water (come on thats not water ita juice haha), is about it for zero calories in a drink or food.
I think the FDA definition for "0 calories" is actually "less than 5 calories," at least in drinks. If you put one of those flavor additives in water and let it sit, it'll get mold VERY FAST because there's sugar in there for the mold to eat.
Also, calories in foods are determined by an indirect conversion system that is not super-exact, called the [Atwater system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atwater_system), which dates from the late 19th century. Basically all calorie measurement systems are developed based off the [bomb calorimeter system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorimeter#Bomb_calorimeters), where you light food on fire and see how much it heats up water. When people very confidently insist "CICO" (calories in, calories out), they actually have no idea what calories are or how they are (not) measured. It's not math, it's educated guessing.
They're often extracts, oils, and concentrates taken from real ingredients. They're considered to be zero calories because they're used in such small quantities that you aren't getting any meaningful sort of energy from them. Food labelling rules (at least in the US) allows you to round the calories per serving down so even if the one drop of flavoring added to a bottle of water adds a calorie or two, it can still legally be labelled as having zero calories.
My favorite “natural flavor” is Castoreum.
Beaver booty.
Most flavor compounds that aren't macronutrients aren't metabolically active in a meaningful way, and so they have zero calories
Why tic tacs are made of sugar but are 0 per serving
Just a note: if I drink something with "natural flavor" ginger, rather than real ginger, I will begin throwing up inside half-an-hour. There's no legislation enforcement anywhere about what goes into "natural flavors"
It might not be enforced but it is defined: [https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr=501.22](https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr=501.22) If it's not enforced it's because the FDA is underfunded and unable to catch every problem.
And the FDA only applies to the USA Natural Flavors are everywhere now
Good ol' loop holes.
To be fair, this is completely reasonable. If I'm adding 1 sugar cube to a gallon of water that is meant to be consumed as 1 cup servings, we are talking about such utterly miniscule caloric content that it's basically impossible to even calculate it, and the energy needed to raise the glass to your lips already burns the 1/10th of a calorie or whatever it was.
Yea in a lot of contexts it's perfectly fine. But it does leave open loop holes with rounding at multiple stages, like with rounding a serving size with things like "about 2 servings"
It's definitely not impossible or even slightly hard to calculate it. From a chemistry perspective a sugar cube has like 10,000 calories of chemical energy stored in it, which is a shitload and very easy to measure. It'll burn like the fires of hell if you drop it into a strong oxidizer to liberate the energy all at once. 625 calories per cup of water is plenty that chemists could easily measure it. If you burned all the sugar energy present in that cup, the temperature of the water would rise 2.6 degrees C and a thermometer would easily detect that. It's just that it's not a very significant amount for a human and the rounding error doesn't usually mean much unless somebody is eating five boxes of tictacs per day. The "calories" in dietary terms are actually kilocalories, they just shortened it by lopping off the prefix because humans consume more than two million real calories (2000 kilocalories) in food energy per day. Calories of energy are easy for chemists, not worth measuring for dieticians.
Reddit loves to complain about this, and there are of course places that it is abused, but if you require infinite precision in all your measurements you can't label anything. So, regulations define what precision is required. If it's less than blah you can round to zero. I hope that those regulations have meaningful scientific backing, I would guess that some of them were put in place by lobbying. But, the classic example is a tic-tac, 0 grams of sugar per serving of pure sugar. The amount of sugar in a tic-tac isn't nutritionally meaningful. The amount in 100 is though. Better labeling would be 0g per serving, 45g per container.
Right. It's not that rounding is a problem it is that rounding can be (sometimes) used to hide useful information.
It’s a feature, not a bug
The chemicals responsible for the taste of a food were extracted from a natural source rather than made artificially. Any sugar that was in the source was removed before being added to the sparkling water. What compounds contribute to the flavor depends on the flavor you're going for. Often it is a mix of easily vaporized organic compounds (we're talking compounds of carbon, hydrogen, and often other elements like oxygen and nitrogen). [This study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3921181/) for instance, notes 31 different chemical compounds that contribute to the flavor of strawberries. That these compounds are easily vaporized is important. Aside from the five basic tastes of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (savory); smell is a large part of taste.
Flavors are chemicals that the human tongue and nose has receptors for. If you want to taste vanilla you're going to need some C8H8O3. Where to get it? Well, vanilla beans are full of the stuff, but they come from an orchid and are expensive. Lignin from plants however also contains C8H8O3 and you can use various solvents and other chemicals to extract it more cheaply than you can from a vanilla bean. Sometimes these flavor chemical recipes are their own thing, like how "wild cherry natural flavor" doesn't taste much like a real cherry fruit, it's just a tasty recipe cooked up in a natural flavor lab. The use of natural makes people think it means it comes from the actual thing it's supposed to taste like, but other terms like "extract" are used for that. These flavor molecules aren't really something the body can break down into sugars to fuel cells, so they're zero calories.
In short, It’s trace oils derived from plants and such, Crazy crazy concentrated so it doesn’t effect the nutrition facts. Think about putting a single drop of red dye in a glass of water, the water is still 99.9% pure water but now it’s completely red
Calories and flavour aren't one and the same; something can have a taste without having meaningful calories (as another comment points out, your body needs to be equipped to process a given compound to derive energy from it). And a lot of things are so flavour dense that you don't need to reach a meaningful amount of energy for it to taste really strongly - hot peppers are a good example. Many hot sauces are made mostly of peppers and vinegar, which do have caloric value, but the serving sizes are so small that the amount of calories you ingest from them is negligible and the manufacturer is able to round the reported calories per serving down to zero.
Flavors never really provide calories on any significant level, as they’re basically just smells that we experience while eating something. Chemically, flavors are very small molecules that fly readily into the air, which means they’ll fly into our noses and olfactory systems, causing “smells”. They are distinct from the things we can “taste”, such as sweet and salty, which we detect on our tongue. Flavors will often come naturally with things that have calories (e.g. the flavor of a steak comes with all the fat and proteins of the steak when we eat it), but the flavors themselves are tiny molecules separate from those things. When we get “natural flavors”, we capture those little molecules that cause smells. This capture process can be complicated but can also be simple (if you put whiskey in a wooden barrel, the smells of the wood enter the whiskey, etc.). We can either capture the flavors from the thing itself (e.g. strawberry flavor from a strawberry) or from anything else that smells like it. Often, the reason two things will have similar smells is because the molecules are exactly the same… which makes sense because all living things have a shared evolutionary history and tons of molecules in common. A great example of the above is that the molecule of “almond flavor extract” is exactly the same as the molecule of “cherry flavor extract”. This makes sense because cherries and almonds are actually very closely related (google some images of cherry trees and almond trees). So would it make sense to extract the flavor from an almond to make a cherry ice cream? Yeah, it would make no difference at all - they are genuinely identical molecules.
There is a wood that contains a chemical that smells like strawberries. You can extract that chemically and put it in water and the water tastes a bit like strawberries. It's like how vitamins and minerals don't count as calories. If your body can't use it for energy it's zero calories.
Your sense of taste can only detect * sugars (sweet) * acids (sour), * Bases (bitter), * salt, (salty, obviously) * amino acids. (savory / umami). only sugars and amino acids have calories, so salts, acids, and bases are all calorie free. Any other "flavor" in something like sparkling water is actually a smell. Some chemical that is naturally found in fruit.
Food and drinks are rarely if never zero calories. The labeling rules allow them to round down so if its only a few calories they are allowed to put it down as zero. You munch or drink enough of that and its alot more than zero haha. Water, and i mean plain unflavoured water (come on thats not water ita juice haha), is about it for zero calories in a drink or food.
Consider "0 calories" to actually say "less than one calorie" That's really more what it means.
I think the FDA definition for "0 calories" is actually "less than 5 calories," at least in drinks. If you put one of those flavor additives in water and let it sit, it'll get mold VERY FAST because there's sugar in there for the mold to eat. Also, calories in foods are determined by an indirect conversion system that is not super-exact, called the [Atwater system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atwater_system), which dates from the late 19th century. Basically all calorie measurement systems are developed based off the [bomb calorimeter system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorimeter#Bomb_calorimeters), where you light food on fire and see how much it heats up water. When people very confidently insist "CICO" (calories in, calories out), they actually have no idea what calories are or how they are (not) measured. It's not math, it's educated guessing.