Paleo Diet: Raw Paleo Diet and Lifestyle Forum
Raw Paleo Diet Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: goodsamaritan on July 17, 2008, 09:07:05 pm
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I'm very interested in adding the use of a refractometer to measure the nutrition in the fruits and vegetables that we buy. This is a tool they say that will quantitatively directly measure how nutritious your fruits and vegetables are by use of the BRIX scale.
I just bought a refractometer on ebay. It should arrive next week. Thought it would be fun to discuss our readings and experiences on this thread. This is all new to me so the more experience people, please chime in.
This link goes to a wonderful page explaining this industrial technology and simple tool.
http://www.alkalizeforhealth.net/refractometer.htm
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I used that once in a research lab. I love the instrument, it looks and feels cool while you're using it; kind of like a secret agent instrument. I used it to bring up a water solution to a certain salt concentration.
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I'm certainly no expert on this but I used to work for a food processing company and we used refractometers all the time to test the sugar, salt, sodium hydroxide, or sulfur dioxide concentration of the solutions used in the various phases of food processing. Based on what I know, the sugar content of most plants, including green plants will swamp out any useful reading you might get as to other nutritional fractions such as minerals. A refractometer alone can't tell you what element is causing the change in density and thus the refractive index of the liquid you are measuring. Only a chemical analysis will tell you how much of what elements are in the liquid.
Fruit growers also use refractometers to determine when the sugar content of the fruit is high enough to begin picking operations. My brother in-law is a citrus rancher and he carries a refractometer with him in the late fall to check when the sugar content of the oranges is high enough to send to market. The sugar content of most fruits increases as they ripen so if all you used was a refractometer you would come to the conclusion that there was a significantly higher nutritional value in the riper fruit. The truth is that only the sugar content changed.
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Hey GS wanna do an experiment? Test the nutritional value of grocery food from miles away, vs farm fresh/farmers market/local food. People usually say fresh food is the best , is it always true?
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Very good and informative exchange .. Thank you!