Iron in dried apricots?

[OakLeaf]

If you compare calorie for calorie dried vs. fresh vs. dehydrated, there's obviously something else going on besides taking out the water weight, but I have a feeling it's one of the things I guessed at.

Raw apricots have .008 mg Fe/kcal; sulfured dried apricots .011; sulfured dehydrated apricots .019. That's a lot of variation.

Anybody have any idea how big a sample size the USDA uses to come up with those values?

IAE, obviously food is NOT fungible, so there's no guarantee the apricots each of us eats have the same amount of iron as the ones the USDA sampled. Guidelines only ... not rigid values for counting ...

[Owlie]

If you compare calorie for calorie dried vs. fresh vs. dehydrated, there's obviously something else going on besides taking out the water weight, but I have a feeling it's one of the things I guessed at.

Raw apricots have .008 mg Fe/kcal; sulfured dried apricots .011; sulfured dehydrated apricots .019. That's a lot of variation.

Anybody have any idea how big a sample size the USDA uses to come up with those values?

IAE, obviously food is NOT fungible, so there's no guarantee the apricots each of us eats have the same amount of iron as the ones the USDA sampled. Guidelines only ... not rigid values for counting ...

Most of them seem to have three data points...

[OakLeaf]

Most of them seem to have three data points...

Huh?

[Owlie]

Huh?

They seem to have only used three samples for most of them. I should turn off the science-speak sometimes...

[OakLeaf]

I would've figured it out if I'd bothered to click through. Yikes. Three (or fewer) 100-g samples to publish these figures that people rely on??? I guess that gives you an idea how seriously they take nutrition.



And a lot of the nutritional values they give are based on zero data points, estimated from "another form of the same food, or similar food." Including the figures for dehydrated apricots, except for vitamin C and the B-complex which are likely to be further degraded by the extra processing. Which still doesn't explain the variation in iron between dehydrated apricots and the other forms.


It's worth noting that for dried apricots, they had three data points, a mean iron content per 100 g of 2.66 g and a standard deviation of 0.624.