1. Food for Thought Testing the Sugar Content of Common Beverages
Purpose
The purpose of my experiment has been to examine the sugar content and calories of common beverages. In doing this, I can compare my findings of those products to their nutrition labels and see if those labels are accurate. This can also be extended to other aspects of food labeling, from calorie levels to fat content. In doing this, we can understand the importance of the types of foods we put in our bodies and how those foods can affect us. It will also be important to understand the food labeling process and how things like sugar content on the labels are calculated industrially.
Results
Bergen Carloss-Whitefish High School-Advanced Chemistry, Mr. Spangler
Materials and Procedures
Procedure:
The hydrometer was balanced and tested for accuracy using standard solutions before being placed into the test drinks. Drinks were obtained from Safeway, Tupelo Grille, and Dairy Queen, and all values from nutrition labels were found online. Each drink was left out overnight to decarbonate, and then measured for 500 mL and placed into a beaker the following day. Once the solution was no longer carbonated and was at the standard 20 degrees Celsius temperature, the Brix hydrometer was placed into the drink and was left for a few seconds in order for it to settle. Using the Brix scale, the number of grams of sugar per 100mL could be recorded and then later converted into the total volume of a drink for comparison. The leftover drink was tested again for accuracy, and then all materials were cleaned and the numbers were recorded, calculated, and graphed.
Brix Hydrometer:
Something that is important to note about the hydrometer is that it measures almost all dissolved solids in liquids, and in drinks those dissolved solids are usually sugar. When I continued with my project and tried to incorporate Goldfish into the same process, the results were likely off and skewed. This was also due to the fact that it is very difficult to dissolve goldfish in water in general. I also had to correct for temperature, because the hydrometer essentially measures density at 20 degrees celsius. Standard solutions were used to test the hydrometer for legitimacy. I made standard solutions for 0, 10, 20, and 50% sugar concentration in water. In the drinks, the hydrometer would show sugar content per 100 ml, and that number could be converted to the total ml of the drink. This proved to be interesting because almost all of the drinks we tried, from Vanilla Coke to Gatorade, were above their suggested label values.
Hypothesis
The sugar content of the drinks that I test will not match up with the label; the nutrition label will be inaccurate.
Research
Primarily my research consisted of internet databases, as there are very few food science specialists in the Flathead Valley. I learned a lot about food labeling guidelines from this, particularly about how sugar content is on the nutrition label, but it does not show the percent daily value. Many companies, it would seem, do not want this value displayed because it will likely deter customers from buying their products. Technically, calories are counted by burning the food we eat, as it is a unit of energy. I also did quite a lot of searches on the types of experimentation I would be doing, from a Brix hydrometer to a Benedicts’ solution to a light spectrometer. After all of my research, however, I still have many additional questions. For example, which sugars exactly are counted on the nutrition label? How is the natural sugar found in things like fruits different than processed sugar like high fructose corn syrup found in candy? How are different types of sugars like lactose, fructose, and glucose structurally similar? Ingredient lists can be very difficult to understand, and sugar can be defined in many ways. Ms. Sullivan helped me answer this in part, because we began to look at the physical differences and linkages between simple and complex sugars. That is what I hope to do research on in the next few months. Understanding the structure of these sugars will help me understand the role they play in the body.
Conclusions
Based on my results, it is clear that the labels of certain sodas are inaccurate, and this is concerning. The most surprising result, however, was that of the Diet Pepsi which had a significantly higher sugar content than expected for a diet soda. After searching the ingredients in the Pepsi, the ingredient that may account for the extra density might be the citric acid. In any case, chemicals in diet sodas can be just as harmful as regular sugar, and therefore they are not a substantial substitute for regular soda.
Resources
Union of Concerned Scientists. "Added Sugar on Nutrition Facts Label." Green Tips. N.p., Mar
Web. 12 Nov <eds.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=6&sid=996>.
Emily Ventura. "Sugar Content of Popular Sweetened Beverages." Goran Lab. Nature Publishing Group, Web. 29 Dec <goranlab.com/pdf/ventura%200-sugar4%20beverages.pdf>.
"Food Chemistry Experiments." Science Company. N.p., n.d. Web.
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Abstract
With health issues such as obesity and diabetes on the rise in the United States, it is imperative now more than ever that we know what we are putting in our bodies and that we have a say in it. The purpose of my research was to see if the sugar label printed on common beverages matched up to the true value, and I hypothesized that the nutrition label was in fact wrong and that we may be putting more sugar into our bodies than we are aware. After all, nutrition labels leave out the percent daily value of sugar, so already consumers are likely misinformed about their sugar intake. To test these sugar levels, I obtained a variety of different sodas and drinks and tried different methods of testing, including a Benedict’s solution, a light spectrometer, and a Brix hydrometer. Of these, the hydrometer seemed to give me the most accurate and quantitative results. I went on to test drinks at two different restaurants and a few on my own, with varied outcomes. For the most part, sugar levels in sodas tended to match their labels in the restaurants with some values being slightly higher or lower. The most interesting piece of information came from the results of the Diet Pepsi testing in which the sugar value stated zero on the label but came out high when tested. These findings show that artificial sugars can still have an impact on these levels.
What’s Next?
My next steps will include looking at the chemical makeup of the artificial sweeteners to try an account for the extra mass exhibited in the Diet Pepsi. I would also like to test other diet sodas in different places and conduct more research specifically examining where artificial sweeteners come from and how they interact with the human body.