Apologies if this question comes up a lot. I did a little look on the sub and most people are asking this question around calorie value not adding up. But I’ve seen a number of products the sum of the grams for the macronutrients don’t come even close to the serving size grams. What’s missing?
Even the example on the FDA website is very off. The serving size is 227 grams but adding the three macros together barely gets you to 60. Where’s that extra 170 g? https://www.fda.gov/food/new-nutrition-facts-label/how-understand-and-use-nutrition-facts-label
>Where’s that extra 170 g?
That extra 170g is mostly stuff that you can’t digest.
It isn’t a nutrient, because your body can’t absorb it to use it for energy. But it’s still got mass, it’s still stuff, so it still contributes to the 227 grams of mass of this serving of whatever it is.
Vegetables are mostly made of this indigestible stuff; indeed, all dietary fiber is this, although not all of this is dietary fiber. That’s why they’re great for low-calorie diets; they’re bulky, so they fill you up, but they’re low in caloric nutrients, so you can feel full while staying low-cal. Very long animal proteins such as the connective tissues of a steak also may not fully digest, although our enzymes are such that most meat tissues would be fully digested if properly chewed.
(Note that even if you can’t digest it, your gut bacteria might still be able to; that’s what prebiotic dietary fiber is, it’s a dietary fiber type that you can’t digest, but that is critical for your gut microbiome.)
A small-ish portion of the stuff that’s not macros is going to be other digestible compounds. Minerals are a good example; sodium, zinc, calcium, potassium, iron, the list goes on. Vitamins and cholesterol would fall in this category.
Everything that’s left over after you’ve digested the food, gets turned into your poop. Not everything that is theoretically digestible necessarily gets absorbed; some of the macros are gonna end up in the poop too.
Depending on the food, water may make up a large portion of the missing weight. If you look at foods on the USDA’s FoodData Centralsome of the foods (those that the USDA calculated data for rather than being collected from other sources) show the breakdown.