Seriously, how is anyone dumb enough to be fat?

[Aractus]

Here's the Nutrition Information box on a bag of Doritos:

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Where is the nutrition information for the bag? Oh, wait, they don't give it. And I'll be damned if anyone I've ever seen eating Doritos has counted out 11 chips to be their serving - they get a bowl and they fill the bowl with however many chips fill that bowl, and often go back for more. Sometimes they don't even fill a bowl, they just park the bag in their lap and eat away until they've eaten half the bag - or the whole bag.

I've counted the chips in a bag before, it's well more than the number according to the number of chips per XXg (about 30% more or so), so I have no idea where they get that number from or why they are allowed to use it. The number of chips per XXg in pringles is probably accurate though.

But you do bring up a good point, here's a doritos bag in AU:

See I would have thought that you would have had an equivalent of the 100g panel on your packaging.

Here's a coke 1.25L bottle:

The can:

I don't have a picture for the 600ml, so here's the 600ml lemon-flavour version:

As you can see they all say "1 per package" not like your single-serve versions.

But... check this out:

375ml bottle:

3L bottle:

When I finish the bottle I'll return it to Woolies and ask for the extra litre promised on the bottle! I'll let you know how it goes.

You might say, "People just need to do the math and they'll figure out their caloric intake," but I know a lot of people who don't even realize that the calorie count posted on food, especially bottled drinks, is given per serving, and if they do realize that it's by serving, they don't realize there are multiple servings in a single bottle. (I've pointed this out to people and it's obvious by the realization on their faces that they never realized this information before.)

Well I think if you had the "per 100g" column as we do you'd find the "per package" of little relevance. I do agree with you that arbitrary serving sizes are often of little relevance. Interestingly though, for cornflakes the serving size is 30g and I decided to weigh my average serving and guess what - it came out to exactly 30g, so I guess in at least that one is accurate (although I have more than 250ml of milk with it - more like 300-350ml). Products, like doritos, are always shrinking the package size in order to put the price up by stealth. At the moment we're down to 185g bags... so within a year or so they'll re-launch the 250g bag for another round of endless product shrinkage.

With things like Vitamin Water, they are artificially lowering the perceived calories in each bottle by giving the information by serving size knowing full well 90%+ of the people drinking that product are going to glance at the calories listed in the Nutrition Information box, make the assumption Vitamin Water wants them to make (that a serving size is one bottle so they choose Vitamin Water as their product perceiving it as a healthier beverage) and drink the whole bottle in one go.

And yet if I check it here I see that just as coke and others the stated serving size is 1 per package in Australia. I am a little shocked that coke et all in the USA are making artificial serving sizes for what are obviously single-serve bottles.

Information hurts no one and the companies that produce these products already have the necessary information and facility to print it on their packaging. Coke does it. Pepsi does it. At least it will add two lines to their Nutrition Information box and that's not objectionable. At most, they'd be required to add a second column, and that's not objectionable either - Pepsi did it without altering the size of the box too greatly. I see no reason to oppose legislating a change like this. And if it doesn't happen through Senate or Congress, let it be mandated by the FDA.

Yes, I agree with you on the second column - principally because we already have it - I just disagree with forcing it to be the product size. No one needs to know the total calories in a 700g box of cereal, nor does the total calories in a 3L bottle of milk help anyone that isn't going to scoff the entire bottle. While we're at it, we don't need to know the number of calories in a 1kg block of cheese either, nor in a 500g block of cheese - no one is going to eat an entire block at once, and if you give them the calories per 100g it's a very straightforward calculation anyway.