Drug Abuse

Question by LoveLifeLiveLong: How do we know that the “Nutritional Facts” are indeed FACTS?
Everyone knows that the labels on the back of food products “Nutritional Facts” tell you how many carbohydrates, calories, protein, etc are in a serving, but it seems to me that not many people, including myself, know just how accurate these facts are. Sure the FDA says so, but that’s not a reassuring answer. The percentage is not my concern (that’s just a quick guide for impatient consumers), my question is how do they know how many carbohydrates are in a serving how many grams of protein are in a serving? and then how accurate is it?

For instance I get the bags of Tyson’s chicken fillets, and they say serving size one piece (129 g) but when I throw a serving on my kitchen scale it rarely meets the minimum of 129 grams. This has caused me to be skeptical about how accurate the “facts” are within the labels. People should want to know that what they are reading is what they are eating. From a perspective of dieting, I want certain amounts of nutrients in my diet, not more or less. Anyone have any insight into this topic, especially from a biological perspective?

Best answer:

Answer by maggoteer
Oh this is a big can of worms. And I’m answering based on United States rules and regs.

Ok, first a serving is by definition the amount stated on the package. So for your chicken fillet, a serving is not a fillet, but 129 grams of chicken. If your fillet weighs 150 grams, well that means you are eating about 1 and 1/6 servings.

Some time ago there was quite a bit of abuse where companies would define a “portion” as whatever silly amount they felt made their product look good – I remember a “portion” of potato chips was once two potato chips. To some extent the government (at least in the USA) has now regulated portion size to “reasonable” numbers. Snacks, candies, and sodas still appear (in my book) to have small serving sizes, such as a soda containing 2.2 servings or a bag of potato chips being 14 servings.

But now to the numbers. The quantities of things like calories, protein, fat per serving are in general fairly accurate – to a half gram per serving. So the big “buyer beware” point is that the companies can round down to the nearest half gram. If a “portion” has less than half a gram of trans-fat, the company can legally report that as zero grams. If your package of 20 chicken fillets are breaded, the package could actually have almost 10 grams of trans fat, but since each individual portion has less than 1/2 a gram, it is legal to report it as zero grams of trans fat. Which is another reason why companies try to make their official portion size as small as legally possible.

In a small defense, there does have to be a floor below which you can say a product has zero grams in it. If your chicken fillet had only 0.00001 grams of fat, I’d be willing to call that zero grams for all intents and purposes. Also, any measurement can only be so reproducibly precise, so one needs some decision on how precise to make that. The FDA has decided that a 1/2 a gram is the magic level of precision to be used.

Now as for how the actually measurements are made, that’s beyond my knowledge. But the melamine scare a few years ago, when all sorts of foods imported from China were contaminated with melamine was in part an attempt to make foods look like they had more protein in them than they really did. Since in food, the only substance that contains large levels of nitrogen is protein (the amino acids), one measures protein content by measuring nitrogen amounts in food. Melamine is an industrial chemical that contains many nitrogens, and essentially was being added to fool the tests for protein level. It did not, as the press constantly got wrong, increase the protein level, but was simply a cheat to make food look like it had more protein than it really did. And it killed lots of pets and babies.

But back to the original issue. Practically speaking, I always round up by half a gram in all my calculations. something says 1 gram of fat per serving, I assume it’s actually just a fraction under 1 1/2 grams.
Hope that helps

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