What's in a bean?

I'm not sure if this qualifies as a shopping & cooking question, but here goes. The other day I bought a couple of cans of canellini bins, Cora brand, product of Italy. Looking at the label, it caught my eye that a serving size was said to have just 1 gram of dietary fiber. I looked at the other cans of beans I have, a variety of domestic brands and bean types, and for the same serving size (127 to 130 grams), all of the others had about 5 or 6 grams of fiber. I did some googling of bean fiber contents and all the websites I found listed fiber contents between at least 3 grams and at most 16 grams, with most being in the 5 to 10 gram range. Anyone have a theory as to why this one Italian brand of beans is labelled as having only 1 gram of fiber per serving?

Although its not usually a problem on Italian items the nutrition information on many different types of imported goods (often from Asia) are incorrect. Sometimes the values dont make sense, like what you mention, and other times they are completely ridiculous to the point of using incorrect units. The best example I remember is a Chinese sauce with 5 grams of calories.

My best guess is that its simply a mistake, an incorrect measurement or just a typo. At least they got the units right, no one wants 5 grams of calories.

-Lyle

edit: typo

Just speculating, but it could be different nutritional labeling standards between the EU and here. Is it possible that the Italian label just referred to one type of fiber (soluble or insoluble) and the domestic to the other, or both types?

Just to follow up, I checked the cans, and both the Italian and US brands say "total dietary fiber" or "dietary fiber"; they don't distinguish between soluble and insoluble fiber.

I wondered if maybe the smaller the bean, the more the fiber (i.e., greater surface-area-to-volume-ratio; what can I say, I'm a geek), but neither the cans in my pantry nor the websites I googled supported this hypothesis. So I take that to mean the fiber's not necessarily primarily in the skin of the bean.

My research continues. There's a long, cold, Chicago winter coming and I have a lot of canned goods to help me through it. I'll report back.