Nutrient Data Bank Number - The Nutrient Data Bank (NDB) number that uniquely identifies a food item. The NDB numbers assigned by USDA are integers. These numbers contain no letters or other characters.

"New" Nutrient Data Bank Numbers - CyberSoft added new NDB numbers to identify the "new" food items that CyberSoft calculated and added for the household measurement information provided by the Nutrient Data Laboratory. CyberSoft created these new numbers by adding lower-case suffix letters ("a", "b", "c", "d", etc.) to the original NDB numbers for 100 gram portions. The suffixes indicate the relative gram weight of the household measurement: The lowest suffix ("a") denotes the household measurement with the lowest gram weight. The next letter suffix ("b") indicates the next highest gram weight, and so on. The new NDB number with the highest letter suffix designator has the highest gram weight.

As stated previously, the NDB numbers with no suffixes identify the 6,839 original 100-gram portion food items in SR17.

% Calories from Protein, % Calories from Carbohydrates, and % Calories from Fat - CyberSoft calculated these values by multiplying the conversion factors for protein, carbohydrates, and fat by the total grams of protein, carbohydrates, and fat, then calculating their percentages relative to the total kilocalories in the food item. (Please see note below for information regarding the conversion factors for mixed-ingredient foods.)

Calories from Protein, Calories from Carbohydrates, and Calories from Fat - These values were calculated by multiplying the conversion factors for protein, carbohydrates, and fat by the total grams of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. (Please see note below for information regarding the conversion factors for mixed-ingredient foods.)

Note: The USDA Nutrient Database for Standard Reference provides conversion factors of zero or blanks for mixed-ingredient food entries. Calculating "% Calories from" or "Calories from" values would result in erroneous values (i.e., 0% Calories from Fat, Zero Calories from Carbohydrates). For this reason, CyberSoft used the "4-4-9" method to estimate the six added "calories from" fields for mixed-ingredient food items. (The 4-4-9 method is an official AOAC method of calculating calories. Most laboratory analyses still report calories using this method.) A value of "4.00" was used as the conversion factor for Protein and for Carbohydrate, and a value of "9.00" was used as the conversion factor for Fat. These estimated values are footnoted when viewed on-screen. The original zeros and blanks are used when the data is exported.

Nutrient values per 100 g are contained in the Nutrient File, along with fields to further describe the mean value. Nutrient values have been rounded to a specified number of decimal places for each nutrient.