[StavrosK]

Yes, but they still manage to sidestep the issue by printing information based on "serving sizes". Yes, Doritos, I clearly meant to eat this medium-sized bag in four sittings!

We should sit down and figure out a way to show nutritional information without these cheap tricks. For example, you have to show the nutritional information per unit of wrapping. That way, a bag can't be thought of as four servings, one bag = one serving.

[forgetsusername]

>That way, a bag can't be thought of as four servings, one bag = one serving.

How is that any better, really? You still have to do the same basic math if you eat less than the full package. Knowing that a large bag of chips is 1200 calories is irrelevant to the serving size I'll actually be eating.

[StavrosK]

Because people eat the whole bag the vast majority of the time, so the people who need to do math are now the minority.

[breischl]

Probably untrue for any of the larger sizes of bags. I routinely buy the one pound bags of tortilla chips because they're cheaper, but I have never once consumed the whole thing in one sitting.

It gets even more ridiculous for other foods. Do you eat/drink gallons of milk, whole watermelons, quarts of chicken stock or several pound bags of rice in one sitting?

[StavrosK]

Are you seriously arguing for arbitrary units rather than consistent ones, because "you buy larger sizes of bags"? Every piece of food has nutritional information at the back, with columns for 100 grams and one serving.

You're arguing that the serving size should unrealistically small, rather than the whole bag, because it doesn't work for every case? For every coke bottle this fails, I have five cans it succeeds for. Nobody drinks a third of a can of coke.

[breischl]

>>Are you seriously arguing for arbitrary units rather than consistent ones,

Actually, no, that's what you're doing. You said that that whatever amount is in the container should be "one serving." That's clearly ridiculous and arbitrary in many cases, which was my point. I would contend that they (manufacturer, regulator, whoever) should choose some reasonable, non-arbitrary size and stick with it. Then at least I can compare two different-sized packages with a hope of figuring out what's going on. Using 100 grams would actually be a reasonable idea, but is not what you actually said in your prior messages.

>>You're arguing that the serving size should unrealistically small, rather than the whole bag, because it doesn't work for every case?

You're arguing that the serving size should be unrealistically large, rather than a some reasonable size, because you think everyone always eats the entire package?

Incidentally, I'm curious - when they sell a 24-pack of Coke, are they supposed to show the values for the individual cans, or for the entire case? You keep saying that people consume the entire unit - so that would be the entire case, right? What about for 2-liter bottles? What about for things that aren't junk food?

[asavadatti]

"Total calories in this product" should be the metric.

[StavrosK]

The problem is defining "this product". A package that contains 3 snickers bars isn't the product, each snickers bar is.