My wife buys these huge jars of dill pickles from Sams Club, mostly because I love to snack on them. The label says that each serving has 0 calories. How can something solid have no calories? I realize cucumbers are mostly water, but they should have a least a few calories.
Does 0 calories mean I can eat these all day and not gain weight?
You would still gain the weight of the pickle, at least untill it…“passes” from your system.
The probably mean 0 net calories. there ARE calories in there, but the energy spent eating and digesting it is more than the calorie content. So it’s basically “ultra slim fast” pickles…
Your wife has been buying the “New Improved Benzadrine Ex-Lax Pickles”. Hope she got the kosher ones.
What’s the listed serving size? I think that if it’s less than half a Calorie per serving, they’re allowed to round down. Maybe they just declared that serving size was three grams, or something?
Yeah, a can of diet coke, for instance, has about one calorie, but a serving size is half a can (who the hell drinks half a can?)
So they round it down and put zero calories. The serving size on your pickles is probably ess than a whole pickle.
Just to clarify – they don’t list “net” calories. They list the actual caloric content of the food without regard to “processing costs”.
And yes, there really aren’t exactly zero calories. As noted above the combination of small serving size and low calorie density (it’s mostly water, after all) result in a serving being less than half a calorie and they round down.
Here’s a fact that is so amazing that it belongs elsewhere on this site, rather than buried in this thread but: Sweet ‘N’ Low is, of coures, sold as a diet replacement for sugar and it is stated on the package that it has zero calories. However, my students noticed that the first ingredient listed in the product is Dextrose - sugar. In fact, it is about 95% sugar. It’s there mostly as a vehicle for the Aspartame which is about 600 times sweeter than dextrose and therefore only a tiny amount is needed to sweeten coffee. But, since my kiddos had learned that sugar is, of course, an energy source, they were surprised to see the claim of zero calories. Turns out that, yes, the FDA allows for such fudging when the number of calories is “virtually” zero. One gram of sugar would have about 4 calories in it, and the FDA lets them call it zero. So, there you have it - artificial sweetener is made of sugar and has no calories. (Pay no attention to that FDA over there behind the booth).