Food Nutrition Labels?!

Question: This may sound like an odd question, but how do scientists know how much of something is in a food. For example, how do they know how much potassium is in a fruit snack?

Thank you!

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Answers: This may sound like an odd question, but how do scientists know how much of something is in a food. For example, how do they know how much potassium is in a fruit snack?

Thank you!

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Chemical analysis and testing.
There are different tests for every element on the periodic chart based on reactions to applied methods.

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I guess they probably test the food.

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to complete a nutritional label for a new product, one of two approaches may be taken. I've used both. If you know the components (i.e. sugar, water, flour, etc) you can go to tables that are published by the government and look up all the nutrients for each component and add the total. Or if you choose you can submit a sample to an analytical lab and have them run a complete nutrition analysis on it. The latter is very expensive and is still only one sample and therefore does not give you a range.
We used to do a calculated nutrition (#1 above) until we could get some production samples and then make a blend of the samples to get a good average reading.
PhD Food Chemistry and Nutrition

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