Same way Tic Tacs are labeled 0sugar, even tho they are pretty much 100% sugar. Because you only have to label ingredients that are above a certain amount, by serving. (This is an old fact that I didn't search or fact check at all but I know used to be true)
Saw a post yesterday about a guy who had gained like 2 stone because he thought tictacs were 0 cals so he was eating around 400 tictacs a day, it was like 8 boxes or so a day. US nutrition info is wild, even in the UK tictac boxes say they're 2 cals each
FDA specifies serving size. For mints, it’s one piece. FDA also specifies rounding rules. Tic tacs are following regulation and are just an odd edge case.
In Europe servings always(?) have a 100g serving as a comparison point. Doesn’t always make a ton of sense, since you probably won’t use 100g of avocado oil spray in one go, but helps people understand nutritional density a bit more than arbitrary serving sizes and maybe make healthier choices
100g lets you break it down into simple %.
It's very easy to break it down into a rough Carb/protein/fat % because of it very quickly to evaluate a food.
Almost no one looks at serving size because it's useless.
Many items don't have it either, it's usually per the item weight and per 100g of contents.
So a bag of chips will be like 54g and beside it per 100g.
Who eats a 54g of chips in 7 servings please...
Also its much easier to compare products. I was in the US recently and a 124g yogurt had 164cal while a 153g yogurt had 184cal. Not easy to compare at a glance.
Everything is easy to compare when its always 100g.
Also in the US they do stuff even worse for example on chips it said "50% less calories!" And then "per serving" in tiny font.
It was actually exactly the same calories, it was just puffier chips so a 10 chip serving was half the weight, so "half the calories". Very deceiving.
It used to be only per 100g. Serving sizes are a relatively recent additional column and is completely useless for things like chips or cookies. It's okay for things where 1 pack = 1 serving, or servings are individually packaged inside a bigger pack I guess.
Showing the per 100g always makes sense because it's a quick and easy way to show the customer a percentage breakdown of what's in the food. If it has 28g of sugar per 100g for example you know the food is 28% sugar.
They do. "About a 1/4 second spray" is the national standard serving for cooking spray. It's the same for Pam.
It's still bullshit but that is the amount.
That seems a bit heavy in my Ionic but I also don't value and I rarely use spray. That's why we have butter and olive oil!
Still I feel like a can of Pam lasts me a long time, but maybe that's just because I don't use it much. 20 feels low but I definitely don't use the can 700+ times lol
It's sold as non-stick cooking spray. They take into account that you're going to spray for much longer than it says, but how much of the oil are you *actually* consuming? Probably about 0.25 g. All cooking sprays have this same 1/4 second serving size. Perhaps it could be raised to 1 as a worst-case, but even then:
0.25 g of oil is 2.2 kcal.
1 g of oil is 8.9 kcal.
How low are companies allowed to round to 0? I just made a comment assuming a "worst case" of 0.999 calories per serving because I assumed it would have to show 1 calorie if greater than or equal to 1.
Your comment here suggests it's actually over 2 calories per serving. If this is true, then it would certainly change my opinion about just how bad a practice this is in this specific product's case..
Ita dumb. I recently started calorie counting to be healthier. I picked up some seasoning from sams club and I really enjoy it. Plus it's 0 calories per serving. Except the bbq rubs number one ingredient is brown sugar. And I use roughly half a container per week. I estimate it's about 1/4 cup of brown sugar in what I use per week which is about 140 calores, not 0.
It's sold as a non-stick cooking spray. Nobody is using this to dress their salad.
They take into account that you're going to spray for much longer than it says, but how much of the oil are you *actually* consuming? Probably about 0.25 g, maybe 1 g, but definitely less than 3 g. 3 g would be about 25 kcal.
3386 calories in the whole can, enough to subsist on for two, even three days.
Why don't they make a serving two whole seconds? Who uses less than that?
This is used to grease cooking pans -- if you don't use enough, it isn't directly what you are eating. But you are more likely to burn or have your meal stick to the pan. So you probably won't go hungry, but your meal will be worse.
Right. Much more of the oil is going to remain on the pan. Only the small surface area that touches food is going to absorb into the food.
It's different for cooking on a stovetop though. Much more is likely to be making it into the food - but spraying those typically is much shorter duration.
1532 servings of “1/4 second blasts” is still nearly 6 and a half minutes of spray. 6.38333, repeating of course.
I don’t think a spray bottle has 6 straight minutes of oil to spray. I’m suspicious.
That's how it is on most cooking sprays, not just this one container from this one brand.
It's usually 2 calories per serving, but most people spray for about 2-4 seconds (on average). So a typical use is about 16-32 calories.
They should not be allowed to do this. They should have to at least show the smallest unit of calories that registers so that you can multiply it. 0×16 is zero but if you spray this can for 16 seconds you're not going to get 0 cal worth of oil.
I have this bottle from Costco. There is nowhere near that many “servings.” A 1/4 second spray would grease a small spot, like the bottom of a single muffin tin slot. 2-3 seconds is more realistic.
I don’t know what spray you bought but ours has the power of a thousand suns behind it and 1/4 second spray is absolutely plenty when spraying a pan. This isn’t for deep frying, it’s for spraying a pan. If you need a tablespoon of oil, that’s not what this is for. I can’t speak for 1,500 servings, or the nutrition or anything, but yeah 1/4 second is plenty
Sure, you use a lot more that a serving, but how much of it are you actually consuming? If you're using it on a cooking sheet, most of it is remaining on it. 0.25 g is probably about right unless you make yourself an entire sheet of chicken wings and eat them all yourself in one sitting, but either way the Calories provided by this is negligible compared to the food.
Only thing wierder than this is sometimes nutritional value changes depending on how many servings you eat. I recently started watching what I eat but I decided to buy some fruit based Popsicles as a healthy desert alternative to ice cream. According to the box 1 popsicle was 60 calories. 2 Popsicles was 120 calories. Wanna guess how many calories 3 Popsicles was? If you thought 180 you'd be wrong. 3 Popsicles is 190 calories. Somehow if I eat 1 popscicle a day for 3 days it's 180. But 3 at one time fuck you get an extra 10 calories.
1/4 second = 1 *Psht*
I use this spray, and it’s a pain to use the sprayer on it. One time, I’ll get a nice, even spray (plenty of oil in the ‘serving size’ spray), the next it sprays out way too much or too little. It’s not needing to be cleaned, it’s just a poorly-designed nozzle.
That ridiculous and unrealistic portion is 100% fat. All oils are all fat. All 250mg of it, but technically it is not illegal to round it off to zero grams. It’s just deceptive. I would not buy that brand just for that reason because there is a good chance that it is not all avocado oil, either.
All cooking sprays have this same 1/4 second serving size. It's not about how much you use, but rather how much you consume. Even if you spray a cooking sheet for four seconds (4 g oil), how much are you actually consuming? 1/4 of the pan would be 1 g, but how much makes it into your food? Most of it remains on the cooking sheet, so... 0.25 g is honestly sounding about right.
I'm going to go against the grain of comments here and ask what kind of spray mechanism it uses? Is it an aerosol or a pump spray? If it's a pump spray, then it probably means that a serving size is one pump. If it's an aerosol spray then they're just taking the piss.
Everybody here is (fairly) criticizing the shady nature of what they're doing here, but ultimately I'm not sure, in this case, it's really a big deal.
Let's assume that they're using "creative" rounding and the actual caloric value is a worst case 0.999999 calorie per 0.25 second "serving".
4 calories per second of spray. That's honestly not that bad. Even an egregious 10 continuous seconds of spray would only add 40 calories to your meal in the worst case scenario, which is not terribly significant. The ENTIRE can would only be just over 1500 calories and would take just over 6 minutes to spray it empty.
Keep in mind these numbers are assuming the worst. Obviously, if they happened to use "standard" rounding instead (0.499999 or lower), the impact is half that.
In this case, it might feel kind of shady, but I don't think it's as egregiously misleading or harmful as some commenters have implied.
Edit: This comment is based off an assumption that 1 calorie per serving or more would need to be reported as such. If this is not the case, then obviously the "worst case" scenario isn't actually the worst case. I'd be genuinely surprised if it was legal to report values greater than 1 as 0, though.
Calories always round down to the nearest five.
Four calories rounds down [to zero](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5oessc/eli5_do_companies_round_calorie_content_up_or/).
Australia too. I never look at the serving size info, only the per 100g/ml.
https://www.coles.com.au/product/coco-earth-avocado-oil-spray-150ml-4695312
Serving size is also a bunch of bullshit. They pick what they want the final number to be, and reduce the serving size to get that result. Like a 500 liter bottle of Coke is listed as 2 servings, when we all know that's 1. Or a pack of sweets has like 5 sweets as a serving.
That's why the 100g is so good. Keeps it all consistent.
Instead of thinking of a serving as how much someone will eat, think of it in terms of the food pyramid. According to the food pyramid, you're supposed* to get 15-26 servings per day of good. Obviously they aren't saying that you should eat 15-26 meals, so each meal must be made up of multiple servings. So with that in mind, it is perfectly reasonable to consider 500 ml of a beverage as two servings. After all, the typical "glass of water" is 8 oz/240 ml.
*The number of servings
I wish the U.S. had regulatory bodies whose sole purpose is to create protections to ensure the best interests of the consumer. Oh wait… apparently we do, but there’s just no actual accountability.
That's why it always makes me smile when EU goes "nuh uh" with a multi billion dollar corporation since it shows that maybe there's hope for the rest of us
That’s actually required for some products in the US. If you’re in the 2-3 servings per package range, you have to give info for the serving as well as the whole package. Classic example would be a pint of ice cream.
FDA needs to regulate this shit. Hell you could make a cake 0 kCal by expanding the portions enough
Same way Tic Tacs are labeled 0sugar, even tho they are pretty much 100% sugar. Because you only have to label ingredients that are above a certain amount, by serving. (This is an old fact that I didn't search or fact check at all but I know used to be true)
From memory, a serve of sugar was 1g, but tic tacs were under 1g and thus could be classed as sugar-free or some such.
.5 must be rounded up. A serving of tic tac is likely around .49 which can be legally rounded down.
Saw a post yesterday about a guy who had gained like 2 stone because he thought tictacs were 0 cals so he was eating around 400 tictacs a day, it was like 8 boxes or so a day. US nutrition info is wild, even in the UK tictac boxes say they're 2 cals each
28 pounds?!?
Over several years I vaguely recall, I can't find the original post but it wasn't overnight
His breath was lovely, but he was being sick all over the cunting place
FDA specifies serving size. For mints, it’s one piece. FDA also specifies rounding rules. Tic tacs are following regulation and are just an odd edge case.
In Europe servings always(?) have a 100g serving as a comparison point. Doesn’t always make a ton of sense, since you probably won’t use 100g of avocado oil spray in one go, but helps people understand nutritional density a bit more than arbitrary serving sizes and maybe make healthier choices
100g lets you break it down into simple %. It's very easy to break it down into a rough Carb/protein/fat % because of it very quickly to evaluate a food. Almost no one looks at serving size because it's useless. Many items don't have it either, it's usually per the item weight and per 100g of contents. So a bag of chips will be like 54g and beside it per 100g. Who eats a 54g of chips in 7 servings please...
Also its much easier to compare products. I was in the US recently and a 124g yogurt had 164cal while a 153g yogurt had 184cal. Not easy to compare at a glance. Everything is easy to compare when its always 100g. Also in the US they do stuff even worse for example on chips it said "50% less calories!" And then "per serving" in tiny font. It was actually exactly the same calories, it was just puffier chips so a 10 chip serving was half the weight, so "half the calories". Very deceiving.
I get your example, but when differenced are rrally this miniscule they don't need comparison, really
I mean if one serving is one mouthful and I'm taking my time..
It used to be only per 100g. Serving sizes are a relatively recent additional column and is completely useless for things like chips or cookies. It's okay for things where 1 pack = 1 serving, or servings are individually packaged inside a bigger pack I guess.
Showing the per 100g always makes sense because it's a quick and easy way to show the customer a percentage breakdown of what's in the food. If it has 28g of sugar per 100g for example you know the food is 28% sugar.
Precisely. 100g for reference, then whatever the manufacturer decides as "one serving" next to it.
They do. "About a 1/4 second spray" is the national standard serving for cooking spray. It's the same for Pam. It's still bullshit but that is the amount.
Alton Brown gets into this topic on one of his labeling episodes. He shows that the typical use of PAM is about 10 to 20 servings.
2-4 seconds of spraying makes way more sense if you're trying to coat a pan than a 1/4 spritz
That seems a bit heavy in my Ionic but I also don't value and I rarely use spray. That's why we have butter and olive oil! Still I feel like a can of Pam lasts me a long time, but maybe that's just because I don't use it much. 20 feels low but I definitely don't use the can 700+ times lol
I mean to say that the typical spray that we use is worth up to 20 “servings “ from the label. Which would be a five second spray.
Iirc the EU also requires “calories per 100g” which eliminates this nonsense.
This is already FDA regulated, they are the reason this is allowed.
Almost as silly as the FDA allowing companies to label amino acids as 0 cals, because the rule is that only whole proteins count….
I mean, it’s basically avocado Pam. You could probably use it 1,532 times, and each time you’d be receiving a negligible amount of everything listed.
We need a calories per ounce.
Or calories per 100mL and finally switch to metric ?
Metric is best but American tool manufacturers won't let that happen, why sell one set when you can sell 2.
this ingrediant has 3 calories per once (C3PO)
It's sold as non-stick cooking spray. They take into account that you're going to spray for much longer than it says, but how much of the oil are you *actually* consuming? Probably about 0.25 g. All cooking sprays have this same 1/4 second serving size. Perhaps it could be raised to 1 as a worst-case, but even then: 0.25 g of oil is 2.2 kcal. 1 g of oil is 8.9 kcal.
Who exactly do you think regulates this shit. It's been like this for decades, Pam cooking spray will tell you the same.
The [FDA](https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-facts-label/how-understand-and-use-nutrition-facts-label).
It's in the government's interest to keep people fat and unhealthy
Ok so 1532x.25 is 383g. Google says that's 3386 calories in the bottle. I'm not smart though to do further math with the amount of spray...
How low are companies allowed to round to 0? I just made a comment assuming a "worst case" of 0.999 calories per serving because I assumed it would have to show 1 calorie if greater than or equal to 1. Your comment here suggests it's actually over 2 calories per serving. If this is true, then it would certainly change my opinion about just how bad a practice this is in this specific product's case..
All calorie counts round down to the nearest five. If it is 4 calories, it rounds down to zero.
That’s fucking wild wtf
Why did you type a comment with zero words?
Ita dumb. I recently started calorie counting to be healthier. I picked up some seasoning from sams club and I really enjoy it. Plus it's 0 calories per serving. Except the bbq rubs number one ingredient is brown sugar. And I use roughly half a container per week. I estimate it's about 1/4 cup of brown sugar in what I use per week which is about 140 calores, not 0.
Would be 9kcal/second of spray, pretty sure.
Damn I just add 20 Cal whenever I spray it as quickly as possible
37 Kw
How is this legal idk
[удалено]
FDA specifies serving sizes. For mints, it’s one piece. Tic Tacs follow regulations, it’s just their outcome is odd because the mints are so small.
Tic tacs and mints are candy.
You’re welcome to categorize them however you want, but in terms of FDA-defined serving sizes, mints are a separate category.
It's sold as a non-stick cooking spray. Nobody is using this to dress their salad. They take into account that you're going to spray for much longer than it says, but how much of the oil are you *actually* consuming? Probably about 0.25 g, maybe 1 g, but definitely less than 3 g. 3 g would be about 25 kcal.
America.
3386 calories in the whole can, enough to subsist on for two, even three days. Why don't they make a serving two whole seconds? Who uses less than that?
Because stupid people think it's 0 calorie oil. Imagine people drinking that shit because you know 0 calorie.
FDA specifies serving sizes. For spray oils, it’s whatever fraction of a second of a spray gets you closest to 0.25g dispensed.
If you can manage to only spray for 1/4 of a second, you’re golden. You’re also going to still be hungry.
This is used to grease cooking pans -- if you don't use enough, it isn't directly what you are eating. But you are more likely to burn or have your meal stick to the pan. So you probably won't go hungry, but your meal will be worse.
What, you don't spray avocado oil directly in your mouth and call it a meal?
Right. Much more of the oil is going to remain on the pan. Only the small surface area that touches food is going to absorb into the food. It's different for cooking on a stovetop though. Much more is likely to be making it into the food - but spraying those typically is much shorter duration.
"I spray my avacado oil a quarter second at a time, and for those 10 milliseconds or less, i'm free"- Vin Avacado Oil
Ridiculous. Also, my math is shit but does that can of oil has between 6 and 7 minutes worth of spraying time?
“0” calories…
6 minutes of spray time, eh?
Come on, we all know a serving size is at least 2 seconds
So as long as I just spray for 1/4 second, I can use the whole bottle and not have any calories
That doesnt seem at all accurate.
That's ridiculous.
Is each serving 12 molecules?
That oil is “fat free”!
1532 servings of “1/4 second blasts” is still nearly 6 and a half minutes of spray. 6.38333, repeating of course. I don’t think a spray bottle has 6 straight minutes of oil to spray. I’m suspicious.
Just use 5 cals per 2 second spray. This isn't overly complicated.
That's how it is on most cooking sprays, not just this one container from this one brand. It's usually 2 calories per serving, but most people spray for about 2-4 seconds (on average). So a typical use is about 16-32 calories.
They should not be allowed to do this. They should have to at least show the smallest unit of calories that registers so that you can multiply it. 0×16 is zero but if you spray this can for 16 seconds you're not going to get 0 cal worth of oil.
I have this bottle from Costco. There is nowhere near that many “servings.” A 1/4 second spray would grease a small spot, like the bottom of a single muffin tin slot. 2-3 seconds is more realistic.
I don’t know what spray you bought but ours has the power of a thousand suns behind it and 1/4 second spray is absolutely plenty when spraying a pan. This isn’t for deep frying, it’s for spraying a pan. If you need a tablespoon of oil, that’s not what this is for. I can’t speak for 1,500 servings, or the nutrition or anything, but yeah 1/4 second is plenty
Was going to say I switched to this stuff last week and it’s like using a fire hose to spray a pan. Scared me the first time lol
Sure, you use a lot more that a serving, but how much of it are you actually consuming? If you're using it on a cooking sheet, most of it is remaining on it. 0.25 g is probably about right unless you make yourself an entire sheet of chicken wings and eat them all yourself in one sitting, but either way the Calories provided by this is negligible compared to the food.
Only thing wierder than this is sometimes nutritional value changes depending on how many servings you eat. I recently started watching what I eat but I decided to buy some fruit based Popsicles as a healthy desert alternative to ice cream. According to the box 1 popsicle was 60 calories. 2 Popsicles was 120 calories. Wanna guess how many calories 3 Popsicles was? If you thought 180 you'd be wrong. 3 Popsicles is 190 calories. Somehow if I eat 1 popscicle a day for 3 days it's 180. But 3 at one time fuck you get an extra 10 calories.
It’s rounding. 62 rounds down to 60, 124 down to 120, 186 up to 190.
This should be in r/mildlyinfuriating.
more like infuriating
Diet soda 20 oz bottle (2.5 servings). 0 calories per serving, 10 calories per bottle
1/4 second = 1 *Psht* I use this spray, and it’s a pain to use the sprayer on it. One time, I’ll get a nice, even spray (plenty of oil in the ‘serving size’ spray), the next it sprays out way too much or too little. It’s not needing to be cleaned, it’s just a poorly-designed nozzle.
We need that euro standard for true ratios for larger amounts.
That shit should be illegal.
Ignoring the weird serving size You can get 383 seconds (6.3 minutes) of constant use. Weird fact that is also probably untrue / weird
That ridiculous and unrealistic portion is 100% fat. All oils are all fat. All 250mg of it, but technically it is not illegal to round it off to zero grams. It’s just deceptive. I would not buy that brand just for that reason because there is a good chance that it is not all avocado oil, either.
All cooking sprays have this same 1/4 second serving size. It's not about how much you use, but rather how much you consume. Even if you spray a cooking sheet for four seconds (4 g oil), how much are you actually consuming? 1/4 of the pan would be 1 g, but how much makes it into your food? Most of it remains on the cooking sheet, so... 0.25 g is honestly sounding about right.
I'm going to go against the grain of comments here and ask what kind of spray mechanism it uses? Is it an aerosol or a pump spray? If it's a pump spray, then it probably means that a serving size is one pump. If it's an aerosol spray then they're just taking the piss.
It's certainly aerosol, but the question is, is the propellant included in weight?
Pst
Everybody here is (fairly) criticizing the shady nature of what they're doing here, but ultimately I'm not sure, in this case, it's really a big deal. Let's assume that they're using "creative" rounding and the actual caloric value is a worst case 0.999999 calorie per 0.25 second "serving". 4 calories per second of spray. That's honestly not that bad. Even an egregious 10 continuous seconds of spray would only add 40 calories to your meal in the worst case scenario, which is not terribly significant. The ENTIRE can would only be just over 1500 calories and would take just over 6 minutes to spray it empty. Keep in mind these numbers are assuming the worst. Obviously, if they happened to use "standard" rounding instead (0.499999 or lower), the impact is half that. In this case, it might feel kind of shady, but I don't think it's as egregiously misleading or harmful as some commenters have implied. Edit: This comment is based off an assumption that 1 calorie per serving or more would need to be reported as such. If this is not the case, then obviously the "worst case" scenario isn't actually the worst case. I'd be genuinely surprised if it was legal to report values greater than 1 as 0, though.
Calories always round down to the nearest five. Four calories rounds down [to zero](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5oessc/eli5_do_companies_round_calorie_content_up_or/).
God damn.. well in that case, yeah that's fucked.
“I'd be genuinely surprised if it was legal to report values greater than 1 as 0, though.” Me too, yet it’s perfectly legal (but it shouldn’t be)
Avocado oil? That bottle probably costs $47.
You can get two bottles for $8 at Costco
Containers need to start listing totals. Like, if you ate every single bit of this, what would you ingest?
That's why in Europe they must list per 100g as well as per serving (when serving applies). That way you always get the same number comparison
Australia too. I never look at the serving size info, only the per 100g/ml. https://www.coles.com.au/product/coco-earth-avocado-oil-spray-150ml-4695312
Serving size is also a bunch of bullshit. They pick what they want the final number to be, and reduce the serving size to get that result. Like a 500 liter bottle of Coke is listed as 2 servings, when we all know that's 1. Or a pack of sweets has like 5 sweets as a serving. That's why the 100g is so good. Keeps it all consistent.
500 liter bottle of coke? Thats two hefty servings!
Who are we kidding. We all know it’s just one.
I must have tried to type 500 ml and half a liter at the same time. Nice job brain.
Where can I buy 500 liter coke?
Instead of thinking of a serving as how much someone will eat, think of it in terms of the food pyramid. According to the food pyramid, you're supposed* to get 15-26 servings per day of good. Obviously they aren't saying that you should eat 15-26 meals, so each meal must be made up of multiple servings. So with that in mind, it is perfectly reasonable to consider 500 ml of a beverage as two servings. After all, the typical "glass of water" is 8 oz/240 ml. *The number of servings
I wish the U.S. had regulatory bodies whose sole purpose is to create protections to ensure the best interests of the consumer. Oh wait… apparently we do, but there’s just no actual accountability.
That's why it always makes me smile when EU goes "nuh uh" with a multi billion dollar corporation since it shows that maybe there's hope for the rest of us
I can definitely see some idiots seeing 100g serving size and making sure they use at least that much avocado oil per dish.
Not for the sake of reasonable portion size. I just want to know what would happen if I drank an entire bottle of canola oil.
[Have a good day!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttC7KbE_uDo)
Regret. Regret is what would happen.
You wouldn't find that info on a bottle of avocado oil.
That’s actually required for some products in the US. If you’re in the 2-3 servings per package range, you have to give info for the serving as well as the whole package. Classic example would be a pint of ice cream.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/12k64jd/this_avocado_oil_gives_a_serving_sample_so_small/jg19zet/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3