All amounts in nutrition labels are rounded off. Calories are rounded to the nearest ten. Fats, proteins, and carbohydrates to the nearest half-gram.
This is done for two reasons. One is just to make the labels easier for the consumer to read. Although precision seemingly should be the better option, psychologically it is harder to interpret in the quick glance that most people give the list.
The other is that even in large quantities recipes are seldom absolutely exact from batch to batch. Underlying ingredients have natural variations even if they all come from one field. If you’re a major company and you’re blending foods from all over the world and over many seasons you’re bound to have deviations from the norm. Milk, for example, is normally blended and sometimes added to in order to get the protein and other counts standardized.
The allowed rounding can cause problems for those who need to avoid certain foods, true. Some cheese are marked 0 grams of lactose per serving. But 0.4 grams of lactose is about 1.4% lactose. For most people this is too small a percentage to make any difference, but it’s not at all zero and an exceptionally sensitive person might feel symptoms accordingly.
However, for the vast majority of people, these tiny variations are just not an issue. Four-tenths of a gram of any normal food product is insignificant, and should not be a barrier to enjoying that food. Allowing companies to put 0 grams of trans fat on a package that actually contains a trifling amount of trans fat may not be the most scientifically accurate standard, but it is an acceptable compromise in a hotly competitive world. The alternative might be Congress taking away labeling powers from the FDA and that would be far, far worse.
I’m sorry that I can’t empathise with the rationale that it is OK to cook the books regarding nutritional labeling because it is a “hotly competitive world.” Pardon me while I cry a tear that some food corp. isn’t allowed to profit by deceiving health-conscious people.
Nor do I find it appropriate to allow this deceptive labelling because reading the wrong information is “easier to read.”
I don’t understand where they can come up with the number that this mega-jumbo bag of chips is 17 servings, for instance, but if it is tied to being able to “round to zero trans fat” when making it, say, 16 servings (or gasp the more realistic 1 serving), would require them to show the actual amounts of fat, that is quite a deepfried statistic.
Also, I think the logic that it is negligable anyway is misleading due to this serving-size tweaking,
X servings * (somewhere between 0 and .4g) is not equal to zero. Sure thing.
So, in other words, the FDA apparently found it appropriate to complicate labels with a bunch of different fats yet allow tweaking of serving sizes so that the labels themselves become meaningless - which is OK because it is easier to read 0g than 0.3g.
And a PS > if the FDA was interested in making things easier to read, they’d allow a graphic designer / typographer spend 5 minutes with their nutritional labels and get them out of the realm of eyeball nightmares.