The Problem With Serving Sizes

I think the Pizza Hut menu I ordered from the other day was a bit misleading. Under the pepperoni pizza I ordered as part of their 'happy hour', which is a moderately sized pizza but certainly intended for one, it says 160 calories.

To anyone who has any idea about calories that's clearly the amount per slice and the pizza is 6x this, but the fact it's an individual pizza I think really they should publish the amount for the serving, ie, one pizza not one slice. It probably has some small print in the menu somewhere clarifying it but why not make it clear.
 
Is it too much to think that people should be sensible enough to be able to tell what portion is too big, how much is too much and what would have a high amount of calories in it? I don't count calories or anything, I know how much is too much, what will have loads of calories ect. Surely people these days haven't completely lost common sense D:
 
It's not just calories though, for example, the spaghetti carbonara I just had from M&S, which wasn't exactly huge, had 79% of the RDA for saturated fat. I saw that after bringing it home and was :eek:
 
kylew said:
I'm quite confused about what your point is. Are you being critical of the article?

I've never really understood why 500ml bottles say 2 servings on though, like anyone drinks them at half a bottle a time.
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The thing that bugs me about that is that in a number of labels they'll say the serving size is 250ml or whatever and then proceed to state what 500ml is as well, if someone can't roughly work out what double is without having it spelled out for them then I'm slightly worried for them.
 
My pet hate is "per x gram serving" labels. Some things have serving sizes which don't divide into the weight properly. "Per 50 gram serving...in this 235g jar". So the jar has 4.7 servings? Riiight...
 
semi-pro waster said:
The thing that bugs me about that is that in a number of labels they'll say the serving size is 250ml or whatever and then proceed to state what 500ml is as well, if someone can't roughly work out what double is without having it spelled out for them then I'm slightly worried for them.
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I actually disagree on this point, I think food/drink should ALWAYS list the nutritional information for the whole packet/bottle/whatever, in addition to whatever else they may put on there for servings or whatever.

One of the reasons I say this is because often you don't actually eat/drink a precise portion size. I mean lets say you buy something that weighs 1kg and serves 4. You are a family of 3 and dish it out between you. None of you have eaten a portion size.

The example you gave is quite trivial because the serving size just happens to be exactly half the whole bottle, but that won't be the case for all products and IMO they should have consistent labelling across the board (makes things easy from a legislation perspective as well).

As for the OP, I think you've misinterpreted the quote:

when was the last time you measured out a fourth of a container of Cookies & Cream, then put the rest away for another day?"
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This does NOT mean they are necessarily advocating eating the whole tub in one sitting. They are just saying that you wouldn't just serve up a quarter of it. Maybe you'd have a third, maybe half, maybe some random percentage, maybe the whole lot - who knows.

To be honest, with most products that aren't individually packaged into portions it's actually pretty hard to precisely eat an exact portion without going out of you way (weighing etc)
 
Serving sizes are laughable, who eats half a thin pizza? Even a full one is not enough for a dinner. Manufacturers just use servings as a false way of reducing the calorie count; saying it serves 2 instead of one or 8 instead of 6 gets them a nice green label which people think is good.
 
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Energize said:
Serving sizes are laughable, who eats half a thin pizza? Even a full one is not enough for a dinner. Manufacturers just use servings as a false way of reducing the calorie count; saying it serves 2 instead of one or 8 instead of 6 gets them a nice green label which people think is good.
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tru dat
 
I can eat a pint of ice cream and I'm no tubbo.

Better of watching calories than portion sizes IMHO.
 
doofer said:
My favourite food labelling is the:

**ONLY 100Calories!!** in 1/7th of a slice of this Pizza.
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Where the labeling is deliberately trying to mislead, i can understand people asking for more control but it does come back to people not having a clue.

To misquote Generation Kill, There is something wrong when the poorest members of society are the fattest, something which has never been known in the history of mankind.
 
Camarilla said:
It's not just calories though, for example, the spaghetti carbonara I just had from M&S, which wasn't exactly huge, had 79% of the RDA for saturated fat. I saw that after bringing it home and was :eek:
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The actual problem is with transfats and sugars, not saturated fats. I'm not sure why all this buzz about fat still goes on, but it's nonsense. It's like those "low fat meals" are often full of sugar to replace the flavour that's been lost by reducing the fat. They'll have to change this at some point because excess sugar will make you pile on weight rather than saturated fat.

semi-pro waster said:
The thing that bugs me about that is that in a number of labels they'll say the serving size is 250ml or whatever and then proceed to state what 500ml is as well, if someone can't roughly work out what double is without having it spelled out for them then I'm slightly worried for them.
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Personally, I'd prefer (though I don't really check calories much) that they just put the contents of the jar on and that's it. It's all well and good having a label about half the contents of the jar, but it's only true if you measure out that portion accurately (pedantic, I know) so is just as meaningless really. At least if they list the whole jar/bottle you can make a rough guess about the values of it.

J-FRO said:
I can eat a pint of ice cream and I'm no tubbo.

Better of watching calories than portion sizes IMHO.
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To be honest, they're both somewhat meaningless. It's best watching the type of food you make and eat. Don't buy ready meals, learn to cook from scratch as much as you can, for example when I have pasta with a tomato sauce, or spaghetti bolognaise, I don't use any sauces from a jar. I'll use tinned tomatoes, or tomato puree, various vegetables, spices, herbs and in the case of bolognaise, the meat juices add flavour.

That's far better than counting calories and watching portion sizes because it's nowhere near as simple as that. The whole RDA thing is only a loose baseline anyway, and I've found that it's angled towards people who are just about skin and bones, who don't do any physical activity at all. :p (there's no way I could handle 2000 calories a day).
 
HangTime said:
I actually disagree on this point, I think food/drink should ALWAYS list the nutritional information for the whole packet/bottle/whatever, in addition to whatever else they may put on there for servings or whatever.

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kylew said:
Personally, I'd prefer (though I don't really check calories much) that they just put the contents of the jar on and that's it. It's all well and good having a label about half the contents of the jar, but it's only true if you measure out that portion accurately (pedantic, I know) so is just as meaningless really. At least if they list the whole jar/bottle you can make a rough guess about the values of it.
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Since it's the same answer to both, I'd prefer if they just labelled for the whole product as well. It seems somewhat superfluous to give you a specific measurement that you may or may not choose to serve as well as the figures for the whole thing so just give the overall percentages/grammes/whatever and if anyone wants to work out proportions of it in whatever particular measure suits them then they can do so.

And yes, the example is trivial, that's precisely why it bugs me. I don't necessarily expect people to be able to calculate 1/15 of a jar of peanut butter in their head (pretty much all phones have a calculator on them if someone is that bothered) but to be able to work out what values are in half of a bottle of Coke shouldn't be particularly taxing if you're told that 500ml gives you XX of your daily percentage of sugar...
 
yashiro said:
Ignore Americans when it comes to food. It's for the best.
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problem is people are looking to the net for recipies and there are loads of yankee ones out there...


perhaps they should have a serving scale

ie in the uk this would = 5 servings
in us this would = 2 servings :p
 
I bought Tesco ice cream, 2 for £3, 900ml, triple chocolate and chocolate and mind, suffice to say the whole 900ml of mint went in one sitting.
 
I stopped eating the Tesco finest cookies after doing a quick search on their website as there's no information on the packaging.

Here's the info here:http://www.tesco.com/superstore/xpi/5/xpi56863275.htm

To think I used to eat 2-4 cookies a day and on some week's 3-4 packs. :eek:

I agree with others that some food product information could be clearer
 
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