[QUOTE]
[It’s not THAT hard. It’s the same thing as taking a minute to read the nutritional information on a package of food. It’s something you have to do as an informed shopper. You shouldn’t have to, but you do.
/QUOTE]
It’s hard because it’s purposely designed to be hard. Very often, the weight, ounces, or whatever, isn’t on the label to inform you, it’s there to mislead you. Even the nutritional information is very often done in cleverly misleading ways. Like someone said upthread, nothing is left to chance on
a label and what’s on there or NOT on there is ment to mislead and manipulate.
It took 20 years of trying before food manufacturers were forced to put the amount of trans fat on the label. They fought that battle long and hard. The word was out that trans fat was bad for you, and they knew if they had to list it on the label, some people wouldn’t buy, and they might have to
reformulate their recipies, so for 20 years they cried and moaned that they shouldn’t have to list trans fat on the label.
Absolutely. If you start looking at nutritional information, you’ll see that the serving sizes are just ridiculous - for example, calories for 1/7th of a package - who has ever divided anything in sevenths? Or the serving size for something that is sold in a size that most people eat all at once, but the serving size is one half or some absurd portion of the package size. Or trying to compare different brands of the same food, and they all have a different serving size, even down to different ways of measuring the serving size (one brand is in milliliters, the other brand is in grams, etc.). It’s all part of the stupid, deceptive, manipulative game.
None of that is really true. The FDA has a very exhaustive list of guidelines that are used in setting serving sizes, which is why similar foods produced by different manufacturers almost always list the exact same serving size. A quick search through my kitchen (cottage cheese, orange juice and breakfast cereal) supports this.
Yes, IIRC, serving sizes were based on a eating surveys conducted in the late 70s/early 80s and are fairly standardized. (Like the whole “a serving of lean protein is the size of a deck of cards” stuff.) I personally don’t find them manipulative, but I would prefer them to have two columns of nutritional information (for those who apparently can’t multiply), one for a single serving and one for a whole package (if appropriate), and a lot of labels recently I’ve noticed have been marked in this manner.
I’m talking about what I’ve actually seen. The FDA doesn’t actually have jurisdiction in Canada, as far as I know. If you guys have much more logical serving sizes, I’m glad for you.
Have they removed 97% of the fat? No, it was never at any point 100% fat, it’s just a different way to say that it contains 3% fat, which it always has done. Though once I saw an ad that said “85% Fat Free” which only screened one day before it mysteriously disappeared from TV.
Clinically Proven!
What does that mean? Not scientifically proven. Not independently tested and proven. Just “clinically” proven. That means they themselves tested it in a lab and they will not share the results with us.
Or, often, if you read carefully, it’s referring to a specific ingredient. So it’s “someone somewhere once tested this thing we put in here and found that it did this. It may have been at a different dosage, in combination with different things, and no one has ever tested what we’re actually selling, but it has this thing in it!”
Three useful words for you all, folks: Salt Sugar Fat, by Michael Moss. I could have written about three-quarters of this book (and am relieved he’s done it for me), but even I was shocked about once per page by his revelations.
Those of you who keep dismissing my comments (and others’s) about the level to which foods are engineered to maximize sales at any cost, from GMO ingredients to packaging and marketing design, may have some reordering of thought to do. The degree to which food processors go to hide the “Sales: #1; there is no #2” mentality will be a revelation in itself.
Did you know, for example, that beef producers *do not allow *food processors to test their cow chunks for pathogens until they’ve been blended with meat from other sources?
Yeah, that one’s a pet peeve of mine, especially in light of the growing size of packages.
For example, a little bag of potato chips like a kid might have taken in his lunch in 1982, is probably right about 1 serving by the FDA.
Problem is, there aren’t a lot of tiny bags like that anymore- there are things like the “Big Grab” that have 2.5 servings, but most people think 1 serving = 1 bag, and eat the whole thing. One serving of just about any soft drink is 8 oz, but at most fast food places, a medium has gone from being something like 16 oz back in the 1980s to 32 oz nowadays, which is also interestingly enough, the “BIG GULP” size that was the largest convenience store fountain soda readily available when I was a kid. 44 and 64 oz drinks were considered mostly absurd unless you were working outside in the summer.
(this is incidentally, my pet theory as to why the US is getting more obese; everything’s gotten bigger).
Yeah, I would mostly agree that this is at least part of it. Portion sizes have gotten crazy big and I think people’s conception of what constitutes a “single serving” goes along with it. I was so excited to actually find a proper, small single-serving bag of chips at the grocery store the other day–they have really become hard to find. I often have the hankering for a salty snack, but I just don’t let myself buy those 2.5 portion bags unless I have someone else with me to split it with.
And they still try to mislead consumers about it. They set the portion sizes so that a portion has less than 0.5 grams of trans-fats (so they can legally claim 0 grams per portion) then trumpet 0g of trans-fats on the front label. I always check for the word “hydrogenated” in the ingredients list (which is often long and in a tiny font). I’ve seen at least one manufacturer use the word “margarine” rather than “partially-hydrogenated”, presumably to confuse purchasers even more.
If you feel that you have to mislead people in order to sell your product, then maybe you should think about what it is you’re selling. (I know, I know… hopelessly naive.)
Cat is correct. I’m still sitting here in my jammies, but the example that pops (as it were) into my mind is Pop Tarts. They come with two together in a sealed foil envelope. At least the unfrosted strawberry ones do; that’s all I buy. The nutritional information (like all nutritional information labels) refers to serving size. The serving size is ONE, even though they come with two packaged together in the foil wrapper. Like you’re going to open the wrapper and eat ONE.
Cereals are another example. The serving size is often 1/2 cup. Who pours half a cup of cereal into their bowl? Or who eats half a cup of ice cream? You have to note the serving size.
There are plenty of examples of this kind of labeling that require scrutiny and vigilance, as this discussion has already noted. This is one place where being literal-minded is a help instead of the hindrance it normally is in life (personal experience speaking here). The labels are literally true, which is not the same thing as what at first glance you think you are reading.
No, she’s not. I’ve already cited the FDA regulations that are used to determine portion size. The Canadian Food Inspection agency has similar guidelines here.
And I’m sure there are thousands of people out there who open pop tarts and give one to each of their kids as a serving.
And many who cut them into sixteen parts for a month’s worth of snacks from each convenient and guaranteed-freshness foil pouch.
Your endless defense of food labeling and insistence that the nutrition panel absolves all other faults is… amusing. It’s all bullshit of the very highest order and we both know it.
