I don't buy many foods that come with packaging, let alone labels of ingredients. However, I got a craving for dill pickles and picked up a big jar of Kosher dill spears with a famous brand from the Costco refrigerator.

When I fished up one for lunch, it tasted incredibly sweet. Immediately I thought, They don't put sugar in dill pickles...do they?? Check label.

No, they didn't put sugar in these dill pickles, thank goodness.

However, I got to reading the Nutrition Facts, and discovered one of those weaselly things packers do to make you think you're getting a nutritional bargain of some kind. The facts listed Carbs at less than 1gm per serving. Great!

But what is a "serving" according to this label? One Half of one spear of dill pickle. Who eats one half of a dill pickle spear???

I can handle one carb of pickle. But I didn't appreciate the fudged numbers, if not the deception, of that nutrition label. It's a kind of sticker shock I'll mostly avoid in the future.

iirc they are allowed to put 0 (zero) content if it's .5 g or less. So they get to sneak in any number of items under our noses. Manipulating the serving size adjusts the grams per serving content.

Neat trick reducing the serving size to get away with a lower carb count per serving. It's how many get around the US ingredients requirements.

Yep, they've been allowed to round the nutrition stats for years - and since then, they've manipulating the size of the serving so that the nutrition stats are more attractive to their target customer.



It started with fat content - make the serving size very small, then brag on the front of the package that it's low fat or fat free to attract the fat phobic consumer.



If they're now intentionally targeting the actual sugar content/carb content for manipulation (by reporting it on the front of the label), it means that LC and keto are becoming more mainstream. But it also means we need to be even more vigilant than ever about reading ingredients and noting the serving size.

Back in the day when I charted out net carbs for vegetables I figured 3NC for 100g cucumber https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.ht...68409/nutrients

After knowing that, I know what 100g of pickles looks like

I could eat pickles all day, probably not cucumber. Likely the salt for me.

Keep Reading Those Labels for sure!

Yup, son and I enjoyed dill pickles a couple weeks ago....serving size 3/4 of a pickle. And the slices varied a lot. The largest almost twice the smallest.

Yes, it should have been listed at Per Ounce so you could weigh it instead of estimating.

or per pound, lol.....

Or per 100 grams. Makes it easy to compare from brand to brand, as with ounces & pounds, but also a gram is a smaller measurement, so can be more precise. WHY hasn't the US gone metric???

Well strictly speaking, it doesn't have to be grams. But some sort of consistent, objective measure that can be applied across all products would surely be beneficial for the consumer.

We have a column per 100g on our food labels in New Zealand. Same with Australia, South Africa and the UK. It made things so much easier for me when I started low carbing.

Grams are too small. With the rounding system allowed if the carb count is less than .5 it can be rounded to zero.

Can make too many foods seem like zero carbs and free to eat ad lib.

Better to list carbs for a higher amount of the product.

Like Grav stated, above, having a standard measure on every label of 100g is/would be extremely helpful. One gram is indeed too small, but 100 grams, across the board, makes a lot of sense to me.

Definitely, 100 grams far more useful than a small amount that can list carbs as zero when in reality it is not.

My point was that the companies play games with the "portion" size to list carbs in a deceptive manner. And all within legaleze.

In animal nutrition, the listings are consistant across all feed stuffs, and true to science, listed to minute amounts.

We do as well. Not sure why why people don't use it. I'm a 100g guy. I recently did a little protein sheet using the same idea i did with vegetables a long time ago from this source:

https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/

I did some internet wandering one night and wound up fascinated by the reviews of Nutra-System, which is a dehydrated food delivery service that figures out the portions and the calories. It's also pricey. Dehydrated hamburgers?!?

I was also baffled because anyone with a phone calculator could browse their way down the frozen food aisle and assemble the same thing; only cheaper and tastier.

Except they won't. Somehow, this simple task is beyond them. They will just cry online about how much they loved it and will do it again as soon as they have the money.

The psychology here suggests they think there's something magic about Nutra-System; or having spent so much money they won't cheat; or they are making excuses for falling off the wagon and aren't ready for the ONLY wagon they want to ride on.

Just to suggest that people sure need a lot more nudging to take action than they have gotten previously. There is no easy way to change the way you eat.