steelopus: toldorknown: This non-stick cooking spray wins the apparent Most Ridiculous Serving Size competition. I’m not sure 250ms is even above the threshold of human conscious perception. Why bother with a label like this? It’s obviously false information.  How can you assign a serving size to something if it has 0% of anything? That means if I spray all 741 servings into a bowl and eat it, I’ll still be eating 0g of fat and no calories? 741 x 0% = 0%, am I wrong?  No seriously - am I missing something obvious? Put simply, it’s FDA bullshit, and it’s why you can’t always trust food labels. Put less simply, food manufacturers are allowed to set their own serving sizes. No big deal, until the FDA decides to also let those manufacturers make a zero where there isn’t one. Specifically, if a manufacturer-determined serving size contains .5mg of Fat, they can call it 0mg of Fat. Legally. Absurdly. Insanely. Often the “low fat” version of a food is simply the original version of the same food, with a smaller serving size, one that allows the manufacturer to misrepresent the content with bullshit percentages like the one above. The FDA allows that, too. In the case of the cooking spray above, I assume it’s nothing more than canola oil. Canola oil contains both fat and calories.The manufacturer has simply made a serving size so small that they can legally claim there’s neither per serving. Has anyone ever coated a frying pan with a 1/4-second spray? Hell naw. You probably spray for a good 2 seconds at least. So assuming there’s actually .5mg of Fat in a 1/4-second spray, that means there’s 4mg in a 2-second spray. Magically, this product now contains fat. Next time you see “ZERO TRANS FAT!” on a label, look underneath it. If it’s followed by a tiny “per serving,” it’s horseshit 100% of the time. EDIT: Dammit. Thanks to dwineman for the correction here. In the interest of correcting this now-searchable piece of disinformation I’ve just created, I wanted to also point out in the body of my original post that every instance of “mg” above should actually be “g” or “grams”. So yeah.

steelopus:

toldorknown:

This non-stick cooking spray wins the apparent Most Ridiculous Serving Size competition.

I’m not sure 250ms is even above the threshold of human conscious perception.

Why bother with a label like this? It’s obviously false information.  How can you assign a serving size to something if it has 0% of anything?

That means if I spray all 741 servings into a bowl and eat it, I’ll still be eating 0g of fat and no calories? 741 x 0% = 0%, am I wrong?  No seriously - am I missing something obvious?

Put simply, it’s FDA bullshit, and it’s why you can’t always trust food labels.

Put less simply, food manufacturers are allowed to set their own serving sizes. No big deal, until the FDA decides to also let those manufacturers make a zero where there isn’t one. Specifically, if a manufacturer-determined serving size contains .5mg of Fat, they can call it 0mg of Fat. Legally. Absurdly. Insanely. Often the “low fat” version of a food is simply the original version of the same food, with a smaller serving size, one that allows the manufacturer to misrepresent the content with bullshit percentages like the one above. The FDA allows that, too.

In the case of the cooking spray above, I assume it’s nothing more than canola oil. Canola oil contains both fat and calories.The manufacturer has simply made a serving size so small that they can legally claim there’s neither per serving. Has anyone ever coated a frying pan with a 1/4-second spray? Hell naw. You probably spray for a good 2 seconds at least. So assuming there’s actually .5mg of Fat in a 1/4-second spray, that means there’s 4mg in a 2-second spray. Magically, this product now contains fat.

Next time you see “ZERO TRANS FAT!” on a label, look underneath it. If it’s followed by a tiny “per serving,” it’s horseshit 100% of the time.

EDIT: Dammit. Thanks to dwineman for the correction here. In the interest of correcting this now-searchable piece of disinformation I’ve just created, I wanted to also point out in the body of my original post that every instance of “mg” above should actually be “g” or “grams”. So yeah.

Notes

  1. casey-fisher reblogged this from sloganeerist
  2. elyssa-perkins reblogged this from blobert
  3. dwineman reblogged this from sloganeerist and added:
    Exactly right, except for one tiny detail:...threshold is 0.5 grams per serving, not...
  4. sloganeerist reblogged this from steelopus and added:
    Put simply, it’s FDA bullshit, and it’s why you can’t always trust food labels. Put less simply, food manufacturers are...
  5. blobert reblogged this from steelopus and added:
    Damn! How many calories in 2 seconds? No wonder my armpits are fat!
  6. reagank reblogged this from steelopus and added:
    The reason they assign a serving size (and make it so small) is that there’s not really no fat in it - something with 0%...
  7. steelopus reblogged this from toldorknown and added:
    Why bother with a label like this? It’s obviously false information. How can you assign a serving size to something if...
  8. toldorknown posted this