what if we labeled juice, soda, tea etc with % sugars by volume like how we do with ABV?
I picked up 24 oz "Green Tea" from the convenience store earlier. I forgot to check how sweet it was, 60g added sugars in the 706.8ml beverage. So this is like 8.5% sugar (g/ml). Obviously that's napkin math but this is showerthoughts, not theydidthemath
Measuring added sugar by volume makes little sense. You can add sugar to water and the liquid volume hardly changes. And volume of the sugar depends on crystal size. It works a bit better for alcohol, as that is mixing of two liquids.
Measuring mass makes much more sense and in EU all nutrition labels show sugar per 100g of product (sometimes additionally 'in one serving', but that is quite arbitrary). And that is perfectly enough to compare products. I routinely check labels of picles - many of those have insane amounts of sugar, for no good reasons.
It works a bit better for alcohol, as that is mixing of two liquids.
Just to stress the "bit better", 50 mL of alcohol added to 50 mL of water results in 96 mL of liquid. Even ABV's defined differently in different places and is a bit hinky.
Yes, but at least 50mL of 95% alcohol is always the same amount of alcohol. And you won't be able to get over 100% alcohol content by volume, as you can get with sugar in water.
I should've been explicit about solubility etc. being obstacles here instead of just writing 'napkin math'. I think the general idea is still a good one, I just don't have the math (physics?) chops to say exactly what method of measurement/comparison would be needed
while I'm all down for shaming the food industry into maybe not stuffing everything with added sugar, some of us need the amounts too.
As someone with type 1 diabetes, I need to know how much of everything (but especially carbs and kinds) to best guess how much insulin I need to dose before eating. Certainly there is a whole world of deceptive nutrition packaging to break down that doesn't help here, but the specific things you must report help to keep the labels honest enough to be workable.
I think the real issue is consumers have no idea what half of the ingredients are, or why they might or might not care about certain aspects of food. Nutritional science in general is very poorly researched. It's hard to get accurate data about what a diet does to people. Aside from locking someone in a room, feeding them everything they are to eat and controlling their activity (which paying volunteers in studies of that intensity is too costly for more than like n=1 studies), everything else is very unreliable. Many studies are backed up by surveys asking participants for what they ate for breakfast 6 months ago. As you might expect, no one remembers this crap, much less in useful detail.
I think the real issue is consumers have no idea don’t care what half of the ingredients are, or why they might or might not care about certain aspects of food.
consumers have no idea what half of the ingredients are
What makes you consider this the real problem? I’m not sure why it would matter if your ingredients contains some hard to pronounce preservitant or emulsifier or whatever. There’s the whole nutrition facts label for learning the end effects of all those ingredients. But I don’t think most people read those either (mostly due to not caring – I do think the average person at least understands some of that label if they really wanted to pay attention to it).
If anything, I wonder if the nutrition info label is overly verbose. I think very few people care about every specific vitamin and mineral. I’d personally at least like to see high and low of the most important categories mentioned with emphasis. Eg, an “extremely high sugar” warning or “low calorie” emphasis.
It’s exactly like this where I live. Not only sugars, but also fats -specifying which of those are saturated- and many other components. I think it’s actually an EU regulation.
It won't happen because the sugar industry lobbies very actively against this sort of labeling. They specifically don't want you to be able to do those sorts of calculations when buying products, which is why they use a completely arbitrary measurement system for the nutrition label in the first place; most people can't visualize what 60g of sugar even looks like without a scale, but they can definitely visualize ~8% of a can's volume.
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