On 30 May 2000, at 7:39, Amadeus Schmidt wrote:

> A good idea to list the various carbohydrates as different items. I
> already looked for this.

McCance and Widdowson does not give the separate figures for
glucose, fructose, etc. It just gives a total for them all, being
the total of their monosaccharide equivalents.

> On the other hand some dietary fiber may be available as
> carbohydrate by the work of fermenting gut bacteria. How is this
> translated into available carbohydrate (percentage)?

The book gives two figures for fibre, corresponding to two methods
of analysis, but no attempt is made to translate that into
available carbohydrate. The book was published several years ago,
and I am not sure of the extent to which bacterial fermentation of
non-starch polysaccharides was understood at that time.

> Do you know, if there is such material also online available?
> In the form of a analyze with a web-browser surface (like USDA has a
> few)?
>
> Is there a database in machine-readable format available or
> downloadable?
>
> Or do you know of programs using this UK Database (commercial or
> other)?

I have read of studies using a Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries
and Food database, but whether this is identical to the McCance and
Widdowson data, and how one obtains access to it are unknown to me.

Peter Smith