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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Shower Thoughts
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Measuring added sugar by volume makes little sense. You can add sugar to water and the liquid volume hardly changes. And volume of the sugar depends on crystal size. It works a bit better for alcohol, as that is mixing of two liquids.
Measuring mass makes much more sense and in EU all nutrition labels show sugar per 100g of product (sometimes additionally 'in one serving', but that is quite arbitrary). And that is perfectly enough to compare products. I routinely check labels of picles - many of those have insane amounts of sugar, for no good reasons.
Just to stress the "bit better", 50 mL of alcohol added to 50 mL of water results in 96 mL of liquid. Even ABV's defined differently in different places and is a bit hinky.
Yes, but at least 50mL of 95% alcohol is always the same amount of alcohol. And you won't be able to get over 100% alcohol content by volume, as you can get with sugar in water.
It's not, though. Some places use ABV, some use ABW.
I should've been explicit about solubility etc. being obstacles here instead of just writing 'napkin math'. I think the general idea is still a good one, I just don't have the math (physics?) chops to say exactly what method of measurement/comparison would be needed