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Wow, do nutrition labels in USA generally not show figures per 100g?



No, and it's really obnoxious, because there are thresholds where content doesn't have to be listed. For example, a package of tic-tacs will say that it has 0g sugar per serving (a 'serving' being one tic-tac), but the whole (small) package will have something like 20g of sugar.


This is one thing I actually think America does right. I'm the type of person to eat a single tic-tac, but even if I acknowledge that there are failures, it's far easier for me to get a rough sense as to how bad eating something is if it lists it's actual content. Ideally there would be both, but having to do 0.85 * 260 just to get the calorie count for this is just annoying.

I do think the design of the labels is completely ridiculous, though. Sugar, trans fats, and caloric count should be made much more prominent and put in red so that uninformed people understand that these are the primary causes of sickness in America.


That's more-or-less what Sainsbury's (in the UK) did with their products.

Most things must show the amount per serving and the amount per 100g (in common across the EU), but they also show a chart with green/orange/red based on a typical serving size.

Example: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/304/media/images/61458000/jpg/...


> put in red so that uninformed people understand that these are the primary causes of sickness in America.

The hypothesis here being what? Lack of red highlighting in informative tables is the cause for uninformedness? :)


It's per serving.

Obviously, it's easier to compare if they are all relative to 100g, but arguably per-serving is more useful when making eating decisions. When I'm buying a food, I'm not trying to do science; I'm trying to figure out how much of a particular nutrient I'm personally going to get when I eat that item.

For example, if I have soup, there's no way I'll have as little as 100g of it. If I have tea, there's no way I'm going to have as much as 100g of tea leaves. The mass of a serving could be 1 or even 2 orders of magnitude different depending on the type of food.

Serving sizes are required by law to be "based on amounts of foods and beverages that people are actually eating" (see https://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocument... ).


The UK labels generally show per serving and per 100g together. Generally I find the serving sizes so low you're best to completely ignore them.


The UK labels generally show per serving and per 100g together.

In fact, I think that's now the norm in the whole of the EU.


Per-serving isn't standard between items though. The FDA requirements are broad enough that companies can make up their own serving sizes, and one company could consider a 12oz can one serving, and the other two.

If the two-serving brand is also advertised as low sodium and consumers don't notice that the serving size is half as big, that's gonna seem to be much lower sodium than it really is.


Serving size is highly individual matter and, from my personal experience, usually much smaller than actual amount I take of pretty much everything.


Why not both? Which is what is used in Europe.


It can certainly go either way, but space and simplicity would be the arguments against including both. On a small label, you might need to use a smaller font. Even if you have enough space, a more minimalist approach can be quicker to read (provided that it contains the information you actually want).


We should consider ourselves lucky they used grams at all and not their fancy units.


What drives me nuts is that the Nutrition Information has metric units but the front of the package may not (e.g. "One Quart (32 oz)" but no liter equivalent printed).

Worse is that many products have bogus information. I'm not talking just about the inexactness of the methods, but in many cases the macronutrient math doesn't add up.

Total calories should be about (protein + carb)x4 + (fat)x9. Too often, it isn't close. I was comparing two versions within a product line yesterday (chili with beans vs without beans), and the calorie count for one mismatched the macronutrient breakdown by almost 10%.


If you think that's bad, I encountered a package of tofu recently which stated "Serving Size: 1/4 package; Servings per Package: 8"! Things like that really make you wonder about the reliability of the rest of the information on the label...


It's either a seemingly random measure or, if in a single serving container, the total calories.




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