Did you ever see those commercials, the ones for some sugarfree drink that is pitched as being “no calorie”? At the bottom of the screen you might catch a little disclaimer of “Per 8oz serving” in tiny letters shortly after they flash that bright splashy drink with the big huge letters of NO CALORIES all over the screen. After one gets past the seeming insanity of this logic, you gotta think; how are companies allowed to do this? Advertise something as no calorie when it clearly does have calories? Most of us know, or alot of us know the caloric breakdown of the three macronutrients (protein, fat, carbohydrate). Fat has approx. 9 calories per gram, while protein and carbohydrate each have 4 calories/gram. With this in mind, if a product contains less than 5 calories PER SERVING it can be labeled “calorie free” or “no calorie”. Something with a gram of protein or a gram of carbs can still be calorie free? Hmm, that seems like a recipe for disaster for those who are genuinely struggling to lose weight and are using these products liberally under the naive-but-understandable impression that they are ingesting no calories. Are there any ad gurus out there? Or anyone who might know a bit more about the specifics of advertising laws and how they are developed? It seems like a shady system.
To be fair, if it truly has less than 5 calories per 8oz serving then it’s hardly going to contribute much to your daily energy requirements, even if you drank nothing but the product in question. How much soda can a person consume in one day? Even if you got through 10 pints of it then that’s still less than 100 calories per day.
Jamie, that paragraph, for me, was a bit difficult to read. Maybe you could break it down alittle.
If not, I will blame the laptop 
Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
One of the offenders I’ve seen is the Splenda granular stuff, which is mixed with maltodextrin and dextrose, and has about 1/8 the calories of sugar. The package gives the “serving size” as 1 tsp in order to keep below the FDA requirement and sell it as “no-calorie”. Except that nobody who would use this for “baking” as suggested would be using only 1 tsp. in the vast majority of their recipes. Even their own “conversion chart” has 2 Tablespoons as the minimum.
“Sugar Free” Cool Whip. Normal Cool Whip is primarily water, HFCS, corn syrup and hydrogenated oil. “Sugar Free” Cool Whip is primarily water, corn syrup and hydrogenated oil.
Somehow, in a 9 gram serving, “Sugar Free” Cool Whip has 1 additional gram of carbohydrates (3) but has zero grams of sugar. Corn syrup, which is what… glucose and other sugars… is not a “sugar”. Even the package says that corn syrup adds a “trivial” amount of sugar.
Yes, but those baking recipes would all produce many servings. There may well be only 1 tsp per brownie or slice of cake or whatever.
Spray butter is one of the worst offenders, in my opinion. Parkay spray butter, for example, has defined their serving size as 5 sprays. Each spray contains 0.8 calories, so their serving size therefore has 4 calories, which they get to round down to zero. The fat content is .085 grams per spray, making each five-spray serving equal 0.4 grams of fat.
So, their zero-calorie, zero-fat spray contains a grand total of 832 calories per bottle, from 93 grams of fat. Cite.
For me it’s those infomercials who advertise Free Shipping!!! *when you upgrade your order.
So they’ll either browbeat you into buying $20 worth more of shit products, or make you pay the $20 shipping on the shit products you’re actually trying to buy.
I personally maintain a strict diet by eating 100 calorie-free* servings of meat at dinnertime every evening.
Along this line, I came in to say that I’ve noticed lately that now when those products you see on TV say “order now and we’ll send you a second fur lined douche bag for free” they are also now adding the disclaimer that you’ll be charged for shipping and handling on the “free” product. I’m assuming this has always been the case and only recently the FTC has forced them to make this part clear.
Thankfully, that’s the only down side of drinking a whole bottle of spray butter.
My favorite was a late-night phone sex chat commercial that was advertising (sexy voice) “Call now…it’s free! Chat with live sexy singles right now…it’s free! What have you got to lose? The number is free!” 1-900-976-FREE
The splenda packets are even worse. They too are dextrose, maltodextrin and sucralose. Even though sucralose is what is supposedly the main, non-caloric sweetening agent in Spenda, it actually is the least prevalent of all three ingredients. The main sweetener in splenda is dextrose (sugar), followed by maltodextrin, a fast-burning carbohydrate that is very similar to dextrose. This is used to mimic the texture of sugar. Sucralose comes in as the last ingredient. Each splenda packet contains 1g of sugar. But since this is only 4calories and one packet is the serving size, the packets are magically “calorie free”. Now THIS is an example of how this system can potentially harm a dieter: let’s say a dieter, thinking these packets have no calories, uses 20-30 packets throughout the course of their day (which is not unrealistic). This is 30 grams of pure sugar going into the daily diet of a person who is totally unaware and legitimately trying to lose weight. Sabotage??
And, on top of this, you have all the other potential products out there that could be used on in addition to the splenda by the dieter. When you add up the splenda packets, the sugarfree drinks, and all the other “no calorie” foods that the dieter is ingesting thinking they are doing no harm; it should be no surprise why that dieter never gets anywhere.
Anyone who uses 20-30 Splenda packs a day is a fool who isn’t following any sort of diet or healthy eating regimen. Even so, that is all of 100 calories.
And sucralose is absolutely the main, non-caloric sweetening agent in a packet of Splenda. FDA rules requires listing of ingredients by weight. Since sucralose is several hundred times as sweet as dextrose or maltodextrin it will obviously be needed in quantities proportionally tiny. But that still contributes almost all the sweetness. And each packet of Splenda is about equal in sweetness to two packets of sugar, so the savings is considerable, except for idiots who would abuse anything.
If you want to argue that some people are so stupid that they sabotage themselves by their stupidity I have to agree. And I also agree that many serving sizes are manipulated to the company’s benefit to make the numbers look better. However, the information to use sugar substitutes properly is available everywhere and has been for decades. Portion sizes are a far bigger contributor to obesity on a national level in the U.S. than sugar substitutes. And it’s not as if the information about the idiotic sizes of restaurant foods hasn’t been available everywhere for decades too.
The person using 30 packets of Splenda throughout a day has other issues than the 120 calories. That sweet tooth will sabotage a diet far more than the Splenda.
I regularly use 10-15 splenda packets a day and I do so judiciously. I do so knowing all the implications and nutritional impacts. However, I also used the term “naive” when describing the hypothetical dieter who may use an excessive amount in a misguided notion that it is a way to satifsy their sweet cravings without any repercussions.
And you are right, sucralose is the main “non-caloric” sweetener in splenda. I misspoke. It is not, however, the main ingredient in splenda. If all the sweetness and taste is achieved through sucralose, why is sugar even present in the ingredients?
Bulking out the product so it can be dumped out of the packet. I suspect the needed amount of Splenda would be a trace of powder clinging to the paper.