Last night my friends made dinner out of one of those skillet meals from the freezer section. The bag said seven servings and we barely got four small servings out of it. Seven servings, if we were chipmunks.
I thought the FDA stopped this kind of number juggling when it came to serving suggestions like soda cans and a two pack of Reeses peanut butter cups saying “Serves Two”.
How do companies ascertain how many servings their product offers the consumer?
Serving size is only suggested, and is also the basis for the nutritional content listings. Rather than list the total calories per package, for instance, the manufacturer selects a suggested serving size, which is meant to fit general dietary guidelines, usually based on a 2000-calorie diet and generally accepted distribtion of the food groups.
Bumping, because this is something that has come to perplex me, and I don’t think the question has yet been answered.
I bought a package of soy-cheese slices last night, and read that the serving size is “1 and a half slices.”
Think about that. If I’m making a sandwich, I’ll put on one slice of individually-wrapped non-cheese. Or if I’m feeling extravagant, I’ll use two (one on each slice of bread).
Under no circumstances would I put on one slice, then open a second, tear off half, and then re-wrap the remaining half for later consumption! That’s insane!
This is just one example of many, of course. I’ve also noticed that 20-ounce bottles of soda say “2.5 servings,” as if anyone’s going to drink 8 ounces and then recap the bottle and put it in the fridge.
Where do they get these from? And what’s the agenda?
This website claims that there is some professional debate on just how big a standard serving size is. Apparently, politics and realism have roles in all the systems used. Like Fiver has pointed out, setting 1.5 slices of cheese as a standard is just silly, so, for some foods in some measuring systems, they purposefully inflated the measure. It’s weird to know. It always seemed to me like the nutrition guidelines were immutable.
This website is more in the vein I’m used to. Easy to comprehend guidlines for food consumption.
So, did your frozen dinner have seven hockey pucks worth of food in it?
The serving sizes (at least in Canada) are supposed to reflect a realistic portion, but they often are chosen more to ensure that ridiculously high calorie/fat counts don’t appear on the packaging. A serving of potato chips is often something like 7 chips, because a realistic portion would have 400 calories and 50 grams of fat. Sometimes the serving size might be chosen so that a nutritional claim can be made – for example, a food is ‘fat-free’ if it has less than 0.5 grams of fat per serving. Thus, I have a can of Pam cooking spray that is ‘fat free’ – a 1/2 second spray is 0.4 grams, so it can be called ‘fat free’ even though it’s actually 100% fat.
Strangely, fast food nutritional guides don’t seem to use unrealistic servings to hide the unhealthiness of the food. The suggested serving for a Whopper isn’t half a sandwich. There might be a rule about this, because I don’t think frozen dinners contain multiple servings here either. Most other foods – even relatively healthy ones – do have very small serving sizes. There are two possible reasons for this – choosing an rounded serving size like 100 grams makes it easy to multiply the nutritional information for a larger serving, and the portion sizes can be easily added up to count the number of ‘servings’ under a government food guide.
I’m just compelled to reply, not to the serving size issue, but to “soy-cheese”! When will this ever end?!? Peace.
Some people are allergic to dairy products.
1.5 slices of cheezoid product is what fits nicely on a slice of rye bread. When you’re making sandwiches for two, it works out fine.
The serving sizes are standardized for various categories of food. Some, like sodas, are based on consuming all or half of the container; others are based on weight, and will not take into account the predivided servings in the package. Once upon a time, manufacturers selected their own serving sizes, and they manipulated them shamelessly.
Slightly OT, but what I wanna know is: who decided that those skillet meals were enough for a family anyway? I’m not talking about the “serving size” under nutrition facts, I’m talking about dividing the thing up amongst four people. The bag says “make a tasty meal for your family in under 10 minutes!!!”
I could easily eat an entire dinner myself, and on the rare occasions that the missus and I make them, we either end up eating again an hour or two later or make 3 or 4 side items to go with it - which defeats the purpose of eating the skillets anyway: convenience. We have no kids, but I can’t imagine a diving it even further, especially if one of your kids is a teenage boy.
If there were strict “truth in advertising” laws, the bag would say “Feeds a family of four - if three of them aren’t hungry!”