Not trusting the food labels...

Alatariel75

I went to Costco on Sunday and bought a 1kg tub of Pumpkin & Couscous salad to have with smoked chicken for lunch.

The label says for 200g:

Cal: 185
Carbs: 11
Fat: 14
Protein: 2

The ingredient list shows that there is: pumpkin (50% ), couscous, oil (and then the rest of the ingredients)

I just had a 200g serving and
a) there is NOT 50% pumpkin, more like 20%
b) it is quite oily
c) given that 150g of plain cooked couscous is 168 calories, and has no fat, it is simply not possible that 200g of what I just ate was 185 calories.

So annoying! What's the point of having nutritional info if it's going to be wrong. I'm going to bulk it out with my own roasted pumpkin and some baby spinach and rockets so it doesn't go to waste, but it irks me.

Feel free to whinge about your badly labelled items here.

tiona83

In Ireland Nutrition information is less deceiving for the most part. However I hate when you think a serving is more than what it actually is or when they give you a tiny serving just so it looks like its less calories.

JoeyFrappuccino

There's a Seattle-based Vietnamese tofu producer called Thanh Son Tofu which sells to a local Chinese market near me. I was buying packages of their fried tofu which listed 135 calories for 4 blocks. They were remarkably oily as well but I took it at face value since I wasn't checking macros at the time. Once I actually calculated the calories from the macro values, there were well over 1000 calories in a pack! I haven't bought them since finding that out last year but I think there was something like 80g of fat alone. I figure there were probably 1350 calories in each and while I wasn't eating them frequently, when I did I usually ate the whole package! I was going through two packs a week at times in high school and I started doing that again last year before wising up. Now I always check if something looks dodgy.

Besides that, foods that subtract calories from insoluble fiber annoy me too. I have a bag of lentils which not only list 70 calories per 1/4 cup, but when I started weighing them the same amount was closer to 1/8th of a cup. I know some people only count net carbs but it seems disingenuous.

Francl27

I bought some frozen shrimp at Walmart, no brand name or anything... it said 45 calories per 3oz. Yeah right...

Alatariel75

Actually, Steggles Turkey here has Drumsticks, skin on, that they have labelled as 97% fat free. I just can't bring myself to believe it, eve though I tried them and they tasted dry and crappy.

if it's true, I hate to think what they do to those Turkeys...

Lizzy622

bump