Nutritional info on food labels and servings/portions?

dowie

dowie

dowie

Caporegime
Joined
29 Jan 2008
Posts
59,129
Say you bought a smoothie as part of a meal deal - a small 360ml bottle along with a main (sandwich or salad) + snack (pack of crisps or some olives etc..).

Would you think it is odd for someone to describe that smoothie, clearly sold for an individual to have at lunch, as 2-3 portions? Portions based on what?

Likewise, suppose your pack of crisps was a 50g pack, again part of a meal deal - do you find it odd for that to be described as "2 servings"?

These were bought as part of meal deals at Tesco today (the smoothie) and M&S/WH Smiths yesterday (the crisps)

The smoothie (Mango smoothie by Naked) lists nutritional information per 100ml and per 150ml (why 150?) but is a 360ml bottle!

The Crisps (beef hula hoops) list some nutritional information on the front of the pack per 25g and on the back per 25g (why 25?) and per 100g... but it's a 50g pack!

I can understand the per 100ml and 100g etc.. is useful for comparison between products, but for products aimed at individuals, this "portion" or "serving" stuff is just total nonsense though and seems to be an attempt to deceive. It's not a ready meal for two we're talking about here.
 
Almost entirely there to 'deceive' although I don't think 'deceive' is the right word as it is there in plain site.

Unless they are really suggesting folk drink it across two days, or two sittings?
 
Lysander said:
Maybe it's so that they can't be accused of making people fat or giving them too much sugar.
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I'd assumed it is more just to allow them to print lower figures on the packaging though I guess that is also possibly part of it

Smoothie is below for example, presumably, a portion is 150ml as they say it contains 2-3.... are they trying to pretend that they intend for someone to drink 150ml of it for breakfast? 150ml for lunch then has 60ml for tea?

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Here are the Hula Hoops, a serving is 25g - so I guess they want to claim that they intend someone to buys a pack of crisps at lunch but then only eat half a pack, roll it up and have the other "serving" later? Or maybe share half the pack with someone else?

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I think a lot of these big firms are much smarter than we give credit for too. And shareholder data is key. I don't doubt that they are publishing a statistics during the city reporting like "we have reduced our calories/sat fats/sugars by x over the last decade" when it actual fact they have just reduced the portion size and kept everything else the same.
 
Might have cared about it at one point but as long as they offer enough information to work out the calories then meh?

It's mildly deceptive but you need to accept incompetence for partially reading or partially comprehending the data given since it's not lying or hiding the facts.

Alternatively the portion sizes are there for people who genuinely care about the calories and are willing to do the portioning required for the product to be an acceptable amount of calories in X amount of time.

If you don't care about the calories anyway you won't care what it says.

When I did give a damn I took the calorie content of the entire bag and added that to the running total for the day.
 
dowie said:
are they trying to pretend that they intend for someone to drink 150ml of it for breakfast? 150ml for lunch then has 60ml for tea?
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One of the product reviews on Tesco made me smirk:

Absolutely yummy but only purchase it as part of a lunch meal deal as it makes it a very affordable price. There's enough for 2 breakfast smoothies from this bottle.
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I can't see that i'd manage to make 2 portions out of that but maybe we're all gluttonous pigs and normal people do actually only eat small portions? :p
 
That doesn't bother me too much, it's still not difficult to work out how many calories are in your bag of crisps.

I get more annoyed at the labels on things like pasta. It always shows the number of calories per 100g of cooked pasta ...but I don't know how much raw pasta I need to cook to end up with a specific weight of cooked pasta? :confused:
 
Yes I believe it's strange and there to make it harder to compare like for like products.

The same way products of the same type will be measured in different units/£ so it's harder to make comparisons.
 
dowie said:
I can understand the per 100ml and 100g etc.. is useful for comparison between products, but for products aimed at individuals, this "portion" or "serving" stuff is just total nonsense though and seems to be an attempt to deceive. It's not a ready meal for two we're talking about here.
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I think the food industry has basically just played around with the serving size, in order for it to fit the traffic light food labels (Calories, fat, saturates, sugars, salt) that they brought in a few years ago.

If a serving size goes over a certain threshold, they have to make each part of the label "red" as the fat/sugar/calories gets high, so they basically divide it all by two, by simply selling the same size pack, but saying it's for two servings.

Some useful info in here; https://www.food.gov.uk/sites/default/files/media/document/fop-guidance_0.pdf
 
Was it recently talked about how these measurements and labels are massively out of what the food actually contains, something to do with how they measure them etc?
 
So they can give themselves the nice traffic light ratings on the front as no one realises that only applies as long as you only have one mouthful
 
Hotwired said:
Might have cared about it at one point but as long as they offer enough information to work out the calories then meh?

It's mildly deceptive but you need to accept incompetence for partially reading or partially comprehending the data given since it's not lying or hiding the facts.
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touch said:
That doesn't bother me too much, it's still not difficult to work out how many calories are in your bag of crisps.
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But the issue isn't necessarily with you guys - this is like the blindspot libertarians have, they might have some nice ideas if society had a 120 mean IQ but.... I'd assume the average poster on a tech forum is reasonably numerate, lots of other people aren't and there have been efforts made to make food labelling clearer, it's also quite easy for people not paying much attention to simply miss the details and assume that the info given is per pack or bottle etc..

We've had hospitals hammered recently and a big issue with Covid has been overweight and obese people, we'd have far fewer Covid issues (and problems for the NHS in general) if adults in the UK weren't so fat yet the majority are overweight and obese so I think this sort of thing is a bit dodgy.

They also seem to be going hard on promoting junk food in Tesco right now in conjunction with getting people to sign up for club cards in order to take advantage of their big discounts on bundles of crisps, sweets etc...

Screeeech said:
I think the food industry has basically just played around with the serving size, in order for it to fit the traffic light food labels (Calories, fat, saturates, sugars, salt) that they brought in a few years ago.
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tom_e said:
So they can give themselves the nice traffic light ratings on the front as no one realises that only applies as long as you only have one mouthful
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I don't think that's it guys - the traffic lights work on a % basis no? So playing around with the portion sizes doesn't change the fact something might be say 30% fat and marked red etc...

I think it's more just about the figures themselves - people eyeballing a certain number of calories. That link is interesting thanks @Screeeech looks like the per 100g or 100ml is a standard thing (as expected) I think they're abusing the ability to put per portion though - on a meal for two it makes sense, it's clearly marketed for two people and so nutritional info per portion is logical there - for the things mentioned, not so much.
 
dowie said:
Say you bought a smoothie as part of a meal deal - a small 360ml bottle along with a main (sandwich or salad) + snack (pack of crisps or some olives etc..).

Would you think it is odd for someone to describe that smoothie, clearly sold for an individual to have at lunch, as 2-3 portions? Portions based on what?

Likewise, suppose your pack of crisps was a 50g pack, again part of a meal deal - do you find it odd for that to be described as "2 servings"?

These were bought as part of meal deals at Tesco today (the smoothie) and M&S/WH Smiths yesterday (the crisps)

The smoothie (Mango smoothie by Naked) lists nutritional information per 100ml and per 150ml (why 150?) but is a 360ml bottle!

The Crisps (beef hula hoops) list some nutritional information on the front of the pack per 25g and on the back per 25g (why 25?) and per 100g... but it's a 50g pack!

I can understand the per 100ml and 100g etc.. is useful for comparison between products, but for products aimed at individuals, this "portion" or "serving" stuff is just total nonsense though and seems to be an attempt to deceive. It's not a ready meal for two we're talking about here.
Click to expand...


The red Amber green colour system for fat sugar and salt is done per portion not per 100g.

I'm guessing there was some heavy lobbying in that decision, because it aloes what you see there green label saying 10% of your daily fat! On the back includes 3 portions so actually 30%
 
dowie said:
But the issue isn't necessarily with you guys - this is like the blindspot libertarians have, they might have some nice ideas if society had a 120 mean IQ but.... I'd assume the average poster on a tech forum is reasonably numerate, lots of other people aren't and there have been efforts made to make food labelling clearer, it's also quite easy for people not paying much attention to simply miss the details and assume that the info given is per pack or bottle etc..

We've had hospitals hammered recently and a big issue with Covid has been overweight and obese people, we'd have far fewer Covid issues (and problems for the NHS in general) if adults in the UK weren't so fat yet the majority are overweight and obese so I think this sort of thing is a bit dodgy.

They also seem to be going hard on promoting junk food in Tesco right now in conjunction with getting people to sign up for club cards in order to take advantage of their big discounts on bundles of crisps, sweets etc...





I don't think that's it guys - the traffic lights work on a % basis no? So playing around with the portion sizes doesn't change the fact something might be say 30% fat and marked red etc...

I think it's more just about the figures themselves - people eyeballing a certain number of calories. That link is interesting thanks @Screeeech looks like the per 100g or 100ml is a standard thing (as expected) I think they're abusing the ability to put per portion though - on a meal for two it makes sense, it's clearly marketed for two people and so nutritional info per portion is logical there - for the things mentioned, not so much.
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It's the % of your RDA a serving contains.


So if a chocolate bar is made into 2 servings (despite no reseal etc) it half's that %.
 
Tefal said:
The red Amber green colour system for fat sugar and salt is done per portion not per 100g.

I'm guessing there was some heavy lobbying in that decision, because it aloes what you see there green label saying 10% of your daily fat! On the back includes 3 portions so actually 30%
Click to expand...

Actually yeah you're right to flag that up (ditto to the other two posters @Screeeech & @tom_e ), it's either it seems... it can be per 100g or per portion.... which is pointless as the "portion" seems to be entirely arbitrary.

Who gets to decide that a 360ml bottle of smoothie is 2-3 portions? It's such an obvious loophole to abuse - obviously they don't take the mickey by claiming a bottle is 20 portions but they still seem to have just made up something for the sake of marketing there.

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Hence why we have so many fat and obese people. Not many people who buy that stuff would eat half a packet or drink 1/3 to 1/2 a bottle.
 
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