On Monday 04 June 2007 21:15, Michael Palumbo wrote: > I have in front of me a bag of baker's chocolate chips from my kitchen. > The size of the bag is listed as 12 oz (340 g), in that order. > However, when I flip it over to the back for the Nutritional Facts > table, I find the following: > Serving Size: 15g > Total Fat 4.5g > Sodium 10mg > Sugars 9g > > Even the daily caloric intake table is present in grams and milligrams > per 2000 and 2500 calorie diets. > > These are SI units, and they're the only units listed. In fact, a quick > look through a number of packages in my kitchen yielded the same result > time after time...the nutritional guide is listed only in SI measure, > regardless of how the product's total mass is listed.
The calorie is not an SI unit and is over a century obsolete. There are several different values for the calorie, depending on the temperature of the water being heated. The SI unit is the kilojoule. Some nutrients are listed in international units, which aren't SI either. The IU is a substance-specific unit; it's generally defined so that various similar substances (such as the tocopherols and their mirror-image isomers) can be measured by their biological effectiveness, which is not equal for equal masses. Pierre
