Have you ever been tricked by a food label?
Our granddaughter is visiting us this week. She is here with Mom and Dad. So the house is filled with things we don’t ordinarily have lying about. There are toys in the living room, baby food in the fridge, and a new cereal in the cupboard…one bought especially for baby Kate.
This morning, her Saba (Kate’s grandpa) looks at this new cereal, Kellogg’s All-Bran with Yogurt Bites. “Look at the calories in this cereal; do you think it’s good for Kate?,” he asks. It turns out the nutrition facts label states that there are 190 calories per serving (without milk.) Now Saba is a bit of a health nut. He exercises at least an hour a day and sometimes even more. He watches his weight by watching what he eats. He weighs less now that he did when we first met more than 30 years ago.
Every morning, he has the same cereal for breakfast. It is also a Kellogg’s All-Bran, but it is their “Bran Buds” product. He thought it was lower in calories than the Yogurt Bites version. But when he looked at the serving sizes of the two cereals, he was in for a surprise. Bran Buds lists a serving size of 1/3 cup. That barely covers the bottom of the cereal bowl. The serving size of Yogurt Bites is 1-1/4 cup—a decent amount.
If the serving size was the same for both, let’s say one cup, then Yogurt Bites comes out as the low calorie winner with 152 cal/cup compared to Bran Buds that weighs in at 270 calories per cup.
What’s going on? The National Labeling and Education Act, the law that regulates food labels defines “serving size” as the amount of a food customarily eaten at one time. Serving sizes that appear on food labels are based on a list, established by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The list is called “Reference Amounts Customarily Consumed per Eating Occasion.”
The reference amounts are broken down into 129 FDA-regulated food product categories representing the general food supply and 11 categories for infant and toddler foods. The amount of food determined to be customary is based primarily on national food consumption surveys.
Of course, it turns out the devil is in the details. Ready-to-eat breakfast cereals can fall into one of three different product categories.
|
Breakfast Cereal Category |
Serving size |
|
|
|
- Cereals weighing less than 20 g per cup (for example plain puffed cereal grains)
|
15 g |
- Cereals weighing 20 g or more, but less than 43 g per cup; high fiber cereals containing 28 g or more of fiber per 100 g
|
30 g |
- Cereals weighing 43 g or more per cup; biscuit types
|
55 g |
Bran Buds weighs 90 g per cup and so should fall into the third category, but because it contains more than 28 g of fiber per 100 g it is able to report its serving size as category 2.
Confusing, you bet. The bottom line is you need to think about both serving size and nutritional content when reading food labels. I recommend you weigh and measure what you typically consume and enter it into PEERtrainer’s Calorie Wiki. That way you will have easy access to the actual calorie content of your typical meals.
When trying to count calories to lose weight or maintain weight loss, it is the little things that can trick you…like recommended portions that are much smaller than you thought.
Weigh away!