Lies, damn lies and the FDA

CharlesScott78
CharlesScott78 Posts: 203 Member
edited November 14 in Food and Nutrition
This was something I learned the hard way back in the day. Now granted, this is really on the margins of weight loss - but I think it illustrates how calories can slip in without us being aware.

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Now, I know artificial sweeteners are not everyone's thing. However, if you use them, it sure looks good when you look at the nutrition label and calories equal a big fat Zero. I mean, it does not get better than zero right? I looked at all of them and for me the risk / reward for Splenda seems to be good for me. I would put it in oatmeal, in coffee - and man, do I like my coffee sweet. I would put 4 or 5 packets. Back in the day, I might drink 3 or 4 cups per day. As far as sweeteners go, I could easily use 25 packets per day. Well no problem right? 0 X 25 = 0. Well, in the real world yes, but the US Government = not so much. From the folks that bring you $800.00 toilet seats comes the rules for labeling. There are two main areas where you know, you are not paranoid if they actually are out to get you. :smile:
First up, Nutritionally insignificant.
L31. What are insignificant amounts of nutrients?
Answer: These are the amounts that are permitted to be shown as zero on the Nutrition Facts label (e.g., less than 5 calories may be expressed as 0 calories)

Guess what? The chemical in Splenda (sucralose) that sweetens really does have zero calories, but it is so powerful, if you had pure powdered splenda it would be too small to package. No worries, they use bulking agents to make it come out to about a packet full. Each packet actually has about 4 calories. Virtually all of Splenda's caloric content derives from the dextrose or highly fluffed maltodextrin "bulking agents" that give Splenda its volume. Oops, there is 80 calories per day I did not count on. Not earth shattering by any means, but if you are trying to have a 500 calorie a day deficit, well you are off by almost 20% right there.

The partner in crime to go along with the Nutritionally Insignificant rule is the ability for manufacturers to set the reference serving size. I save my next bit of distance for Pam Cooking Spray.

PAM is a well known ConAgra brand of Cooking Sprays (oil + mister) that can be used instead of cooking oil or butter. By spraying, you get better coverage of a frying pan or salad, while limiting the amount of oil used.

Each can of PAM has 526 servings. Each serving is a quick "1/3 second spray". Yes, if you squint and read the label the manufacture set the serving size to 1/3 of a second. I wonder why they did not say a 1 second spray. Well, not really, I know why. The same reason search as you will on the can, you will not see that the entire can has 1,262 calories. Zero calories sounds a lot better than 7 per second. There are 2.4 calories in a 0.266gr serving of PAM Cooking Spray, NOT zero.

But, according to FDA nutrition labeling regulations, amounts less than 5 calories may be expressed as zero. If the serving size would have been a "1 second spray" then the calories would add up to 7, and the nutrition label would have had to show 7 calories.
Likewise with the "zero" fat content. The FDA: "If the serving contains less than 0.5 gram, the content shall be expressed as zero."

A nice little loophole.

Caveat emptor!

I wish everyone the very best.

Charles
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Replies

  • Francl27
    Francl27 Posts: 26,371 Member
    It only really annoys me when I try to bake with splenda or something and that I can't find the correct nutrition information for 100g... which is actually hard to find on MFP :(
  • janejellyroll
    janejellyroll Posts: 25,763 Member
    crzycatlady1 wrote: »
    On what planet is 25 packets of Splenda a day considered normal consumption? And a can of PAM lasts my family of 5 months, so not too worried about my spray times :p

    Yeah, I use Pam probably once or twice a week and still just use 1-2 cans a year.
  • CyberTone
    CyberTone Posts: 7,337 Member
    Francl27 wrote: »
    It only really annoys me when I try to bake with splenda or something and that I can't find the correct nutrition information for 100g... which is actually hard to find on MFP :(

    I while ago I created a generic entry per 100 grams from the USDA National Nutrient Database and shared it. It's no longer in My Foods list, so someone edited it and that user is now the owner. It appears to be correct, still.

    Search for "sweetener sucralose granulated compare" and it will bring up...

    Sweetener, Sucralose & Maltodextrin, Granulated Equivalent, Compare to Splenda

    Here is the direct link to the item.

    http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/update_nutrition_facts/181962665
  • kimny72
    kimny72 Posts: 16,011 Member
    chocolate_owl wrote: »
    TR0berts wrote: »
    That 3-4 Calories from a packet of Splenda and the 7 Calories from the PAM aren't your (not necessarily your, general your) problems.

    They are the problems of a few *special* people:

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/26/parkay-spray-lawsuit_n_2956709.html

    “For example, a contributor to (a) website ... writes, ‘I could not figure out why I simply could not lose hardly even a pound, even though I was working out hard ... and monitoring calories ... for a couple of years,’” the lawsuit relays. “Well ... I was also literally taking the top of the ‘fat and calorie free butter’ spray and pouring it on all my carefully steamed veggies when I found out that a bottle of that stuff is 90 fat grams. I was going through two bottles a week, and working out and getting fat and unhealthy.”

    (But yeah, not relevant for 99.999999% of the dieters in the world.)

    :astonished: Whoa
  • jessef593
    jessef593 Posts: 2,272 Member
    Why would you put that much of an artificial substance into your body per day?
  • MelodyandBarbells
    MelodyandBarbells Posts: 7,724 Member
    You'd think it's all about the math, but nope. There's marketing and product sales in there, too. 0 Calories!! Fat free!!! Sure the hell look sexier than the real deal. So who cares if some poor shmo decides to consume "way too much" of those items and stall their own efforts to lose weight or whatever? We've got an obesity crisis in the USA, but screw them. If they'd only consume quantities that are "normal" for me, they wouldn't have any issues, right? RIGHT???
  • zyxst
    zyxst Posts: 9,149 Member
    jessef593 wrote: »
    Why would you put that much of an artificial substance into your body per day?

    Because it tastes good? I used to eat sticks of Blue Bonnet margarine as a kid, 1-2 a week. Guess I wasn't getting enough fat from my "junk" food diet.
  • amusedmonkey
    amusedmonkey Posts: 10,330 Member
    I understand that they don't make that much of a difference, but why not list them properly anyway? Just looked at my diet 7up and it lists 1.502 calories per 100 ml. My sweetener lists 3.36 calories per 1 gram packet. I understand that within normal use they are unlikely to make a difference, but it makes me feel informed. Is it allowed to list anything under 5 as zero purely for marketing purposes?
  • CyberTone
    CyberTone Posts: 7,337 Member
    edited December 2016
    amusedmonkey wrote: »
    I understand that they don't make that much of a difference, but why not list them properly anyway? Just looked at my diet 7up and it lists 1.502 calories per 100 ml. My sweetener lists 3.36 calories per 1 gram packet. I understand that within normal use they are unlikely to make a difference, but it makes me feel informed. Is it allowed to list anything under 5 as zero purely for marketing purposes?

    The guidelines do not list marketing as a justification. Note that guidance is not regulation; the guidance for rounding rules does not prevent companies from actually providing the exact number, it just permits them to round the number, but if they do, these are the rules.

    Some companies may not round down to zero Calories per serving, but I would guess that many companies set a serving size for the specific reason to round down to zero Calories per serving for marketing reasons.

    Reference:

    http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation/LabelingNutrition/ucm064932.htm


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  • amusedmonkey
    amusedmonkey Posts: 10,330 Member
    edited December 2016
    CyberTone wrote: »
    amusedmonkey wrote: »
    I understand that they don't make that much of a difference, but why not list them properly anyway? Just looked at my diet 7up and it lists 1.502 calories per 100 ml. My sweetener lists 3.36 calories per 1 gram packet. I understand that within normal use they are unlikely to make a difference, but it makes me feel informed. Is it allowed to list anything under 5 as zero purely for marketing purposes?

    The guidelines do not list marketing as a justification. Note that guidance is not regulation; the guidance for rounding rules does not prevent companies from actually providing the exact number, it just permits them to round the number, but if they do, these are the rules.

    Some companies may not round down to zero Calories per serving, but I would guess that many companies set a serving size for the specific reason to round down to zero Calories per serving for marketing reasons.

    Reference:

    http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation/LabelingNutrition/ucm064932.htm


    kesk7bqvu8c6.jpg

    Interesting. So it is sometimes used as a "loophole" in a way although not explicitly intended to be one.

    We have a lot of imported stuff, and I often avoid no calorie American products for this purpose when I have the choice. When preparing a huge salad where 2 spoonfuls of dressing won't cut it, I would rather know the calories per 100 grams for easy calculation instead of guessing or the extra step involved in dividing by 23 grams or whatever other convoluted serving size number it has if it's not a zero calorie product when the app scanner only does spoons. Worse if it doesn't even list grams on the label. I remember buying this ranch dressing bottle (not a zero calorie one) and having to use my ml measuring cup to weigh 30 ml then convert for calories. Ranch has a lot of calories so I did not want to be off by much.
  • Samarisa
    Samarisa Posts: 22 Member
    richln wrote: »
    You may want to sit down before you read this one:
    By law, the nutrition labels are allowed to be inaccurate by +/- 20%.

    Indeed. Another great reason to sharpen up my cooking skills.

    (And weighing/measuring skills!)
  • stevencloser
    stevencloser Posts: 8,911 Member
    amusedmonkey wrote: »
    I understand that they don't make that much of a difference, but why not list them properly anyway? Just looked at my diet 7up and it lists 1.502 calories per 100 ml. My sweetener lists 3.36 calories per 1 gram packet. I understand that within normal use they are unlikely to make a difference, but it makes me feel informed. Is it allowed to list anything under 5 as zero purely for marketing purposes?

    While calorie information is useful for us people who count calories, we're a small minority of people and they're not made for us specifically. For the average person who glances at the calorie information, 1.502 is no more useful than 0. Unless of course they turn their brain off and think that something that lists oil as the first ingredient can somehow be exactly 0 calories at all amounts instead of "negligible at normal usage because you're supposed to be spraying a thin film of less than a gram onto your pan".

    With artificial sweeteners I can still understand it because people don't have to know that they actually contain calories and are just "0 calories" because of the tiny amounts used. But there you'd have to drink over 6 liters of your 7 up to even get up to 100 calories. Nobody in their right mind does that, and someone who does drink enough to hurt their weight loss "because it doesn't have calories", really they deserve that. Or they already died because of the Hyponatremia caused by putting multiple gallons of dihydrogen monoxide into their body over a day.
  • lemurcat12
    lemurcat12 Posts: 30,886 Member
    edited December 2016
    stevencloser wrote: »
    JaneiR36 wrote: »
    stevencloser wrote: »
    JaneiR36 wrote: »
    You'd think it's all about the math, but nope. There's marketing and product sales in there, too. 0 Calories!! Fat free!!! Sure the hell look sexier than the real deal. So who cares if some poor shmo decides to consume "way too much" of those items and stall their own efforts to lose weight or whatever? We've got an obesity crisis in the USA, but screw them. If they'd only consume quantities that are "normal" for me, they wouldn't have any issues, right? RIGHT???

    Don't blame the cooking spray that clearly says as ingredients "Hey, I'm oil. I only am 0 calories because you're supposed to use a fraction of a gram coming from a single spray". If you choose to use half the bottle, that's your fault for not thinking.

    Or why not tell me the right calorie information in case I do choose to use half a bottle, or even a couple seconds of spray and not that ridiculous "light perfume spray" serving size? Do you really believe there aren't lobbyists aggressively putting their bottom line over providing information that promotes healthy behaviors? I admire your naïveté.

    Using half the bottle is frankly dumb because the spray is more expensive than just straight up oil in a bottle.
    And it's a bit funny you see this as not promoting healthy behavior when the whole point of the spray is using way less oil but you still choose to use more than that and blame the bottle.

    Yep. Telling you to use just a quick fraction-of-a-second spray IS telling someone to use healthy behaviors.

    Now, I don't think using more oil is bad (although I wouldn't get a teaspoon or tablespoon of oil from a can rather than a bottle, seems weird--I even like a spritzer over a can personally). But anyone who thinks a product that is OIL can become no calorie in any amount just because sprayed from the bottle is willfully fooling themselves and more information can't prevent that kind of thing.

    Bigger point, I don't believe for a second (or even the fraction of a second that is the serving size of a spray oil) that anyone who is obese is obese primarily (or significantly in any way) because of overuse of spray oil. I they are ALSO eating lots of other sources of calories in excess OR simply not paying much attention to overall calories at all. The current labeling may be imperfect (although there are legitimate debates over the best way to do it, as I don't think normalizing ridiculous serving sizes on the big end is a good idea and don't think the 100 g=X method would be all that useful to most who have no idea what 100 g is (in the US) but it is perfectly adequate for anyone who actually cares enough to make an effort. (Same with labeling at chain restaurants. I think it's a good idea and will help those who care and probably make restaurants have more low cal options, but the truth is even where this information has been available, like where I live, most users ignore it.)
  • DKG28
    DKG28 Posts: 299 Member
    yeah...i switched concentrated liquid sucralose because I discovered the bulking agent in Splenda had a few calories, and I was using quite a bit.
  • rks581
    rks581 Posts: 99 Member
    The best form of Splenda I've found is a yellow box of small tablets. They would also contain some maltodextrin but they are not 1:1 volume equivalent to sugar. Plus it's quite concentrated and compact enough to carry with you. The liquid might be more compact, but carrying it in your pocket is a bad idea. (FWIW I mostly use it to sweeten lemonade or soft drinks at friends' places.)

    I don't think the FDA rules are too misleading. The Canadian rules are very similar, and there are places where very low calorie products do have a calorie count because they use a realistic size. Canned soda with the "7 calories per can" labels are purely honest about their small but non-zero calorie content. Similarly, the 0.5 g cutoff for fat (and sugar, IIRC) seems fair, as it allows people to decide between "low fat" and "fat free" products.

    One "nutrient" does bother me: trans fat. I forget whether the cutoff for "trans fat free" is 0.1 or 0.5 g, but trans fats are very unhealthy and remain in the body much longer than saturated fats do. I think the cutoff should be zero, meaning completely non-hydrogenated and saturated fats would make a food "trans-fat free". If it's 0.5 g per serving, I think "very low in trans fat" is a better label.
  • ahoy_m8
    ahoy_m8 Posts: 3,053 Member
    edited December 2016
    Agree with your premise -- it's on the margins, but often MFP-ers advise others to tighten up logging, so it's worth assessing the inaccuracy if someone is having a problem getting their math to work.

    Long time maintainer, here, and there are lots of things I eat almost daily, in the same quantity, so I'm a decent judge of weights. I might eyeball some foods but still weigh calorie dense items. Most of the time, weighing is easier for me than eyeballing anyway. I weigh nuts every time (unless I don't have a scale, then I count them). Oil spray, not every time.

    I have on many occasions weighed cooking spray, though. Pan on scale-tare-spray-pan back on scale. My scale does not register less than 2g, so it says 0g. I log it as 1g. Does it make a big difference? no. But it is built into the recipes I use most frequently. I also weigh butter. I don't count diet soft drinks, but I only have 1 or 2 a week. Nor do I count the coffee I have every day, but I do count the milk I put in my coffee. I guess we all have our quirks. I figure as long as I'm consistent, the TDEE I observe for myself is too low (due to undercounting coffee and who knows what else), but as long as I stick to that undercounted TDEE, it all comes out in the wash.

    Just this morning I was pondering my inevitable logging inaccuracy due to eating out so much during the holidays. I do my best estimate, but you just don't know. I'm sure I'm off, and that has to be by a much bigger margin than undercounting cooking spray, sodas or coffee. Ho ho ho, everyone!
  • GottaBurnEmAll
    GottaBurnEmAll Posts: 7,722 Member
    DKG28 wrote: »
    yeah...i switched concentrated liquid sucralose because I discovered the bulking agent in Splenda had a few calories, and I was using quite a bit.

    I'm another person who did this. I used a lot of splenda too, but I knew about the calories in it and used to log them. I like my coffee on the ridiculously sweet side and those calories were adding up. I also added it to plain yogurt. The liquid stuff from Amazon is truly calorie free.

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