Food Label Tips

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Thought I'd share some info I received in an email from Hungry Girl.com. today. http://www.hungry-girl.com/ask-hg-q-and-a/show/more-calories-than-you-think


"The US Food & Drug Administration allows food labels to be off by as much as 20 percent. This means that jumbo snack bar with a reported 250 calories could have closer to 300 calories.

If a product has less than 5 calories per serving, the calorie count can be rounded down to zero. In fact, companies are allowed to do a lot of rounding down. For example, that calorie-free salad dressing may have an official calorie count of 0 per tablespoon, but each tablespoon likely has at least 4 calories. If you're adding 4 tablespoons to your lunchtime salad, and then dunking veggies into another 4 tablespoons at night, that's 32 calories. Say you also consume 6 packets of "no-calorie" sweetener throughout the day, each of which really has about 4 calories.

Always check out the serving size and servings per container. This is easy to overlook, but it's really important. Those stats might not be so impressive if the serving size is very small. And it's common to see snacks that look like single portions but technically contain two to three servings. I've actually seen tortillas with two servings each.

Bigger and more established food brands tend to have more accurate nutritional information, mainly because they have the resources for it (and more to lose if their numbers are found to be inaccurate)."