alt Hacker NewsIt doesn't help that food manufacturers intentionally make it hard to measure nutrition from most of their foods. They play around with serving sizes to hide carbohydrates making you have to do math just to keep up.
Sometimes they will round down on grams of macros after setting the serving size so they can claim it has zero sugar when it does in fact have tons of sugar. Tic-tacs are the worst about this. They claim they have zero everything despite just being sugar tablets.
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My favorite example is that cooking spray advertises 0g of fat, giving a serving size of 0.33 seconds of spray
The rounding rule is carbs <0.5g can be rounded down to 0 and calories <5 can be rounded down to 0. But I have a feeling even if they properly labeled it without rounding, people would eat the whole pack of tic tac anyway.
https://foodlabelmaker.com/regulatory-hub/fda/rounding-rules...
The margins the FDA allows for class 2 and third group nutrients are also quite generous. I'm sure they made sense back when they were first introduced, but as food science has improved, the standards have not.
> The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows calorie content to exceed label calories by up to 20%
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3605747/
> Class I nutrients are those added in fortified or fabricated foods. These nutrients are vitamins, minerals, protein, dietary fiber, or potassium. Class I nutrients must be present at 100% or more of the value declared on the label
> Class II nutrients are vitamins, minerals, protein, total carbohydrate, dietary fiber, other carbohydrate, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat, or potassium that occur naturally in a food product. Class II nutrients must be present at 80% or more of the value declared on the label.
> The Third Group nutrients include calories, sugars, total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium. [...] For foods with label declarations of Third Group nutrients, the ratio between the amount obtained by laboratory analysis and the amount declared on the product label in the Nutrition Facts panel must be 120% or less, i.e., the label is considered to be out of compliance if the nutrient content of a composite of the product is greater than 20% above the value declared on the label.
https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...
Edit: Expanded the quotes to include definitions.
Plus the whole sugar vs. sugar alcohol nonsense, which I still don't completely understand.
And I think there's also a psychological angle here, for instance when people see that something claims to be zero sugar or low carb, it can trigger a sense of relief or permission to indulge.
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In the EU, food manufacturers are required to label macronutrients (and salt) in mg/100mg or mg/100ml for fluids. Easy to compare, works great.