Seriously, how is anyone dumb enough to be fat?

[Clueless Morgan]

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

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

Interesting. I forgot you were from Australia so I apologize for my pissy tone in the last post, I didn't know your Nutrition Information boxes were so different. (That does explain why you were giving everything in L and mL and not oz though... that had me scratching my head )

I'd have WAY fewer issues with Nutrition Information boxes if they looked more like the Aussie ones.

Chalk up another reason the US is fucked up.

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.

Once you catch on to the way the game is played it just makes you mad, doesn't it?

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.

Like I said, I think they do it to artificially deflate the perceived calorie count in the bottle. Why else would Vitamin Water give the calories only by SERVING SIZE, but create a whole column for giving the amount of vitamins for the whole BOTTLE? What's the deal, VW? Why are you playing games?

This is why I have a smidgen of respect for Coke when they put up front the calorie count of their whole bottles. But just a smidgen. Coke also seems to be the sole exception in giving Nutrition Information for their whole, single serving containers: 8oz and 12oz cans, 16oz and 20 oz bottles, but I'm not sure about 1L bottles. I still think the information should be given for whole 2L bottles, though.

I'll have to take a cruise down the beverage aisle the next time I'm at the store and see which other brands are duplicitous with their nutrition information.

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.

On some products, like a block of cheese or a box of cereal, I agree it seems kind of ridiculous to put the total calories on the packaging, but I know I've sat and eaten a whole bag of white cheddar popcorn before (it's so damn good!) or a whole bag of cereal as a snack, and if I liked cheese I could conceive of eating a whole block, or a significant portion of one. I know there are people who drink a whole 2L of Coke in a day, sometimes multiples in a day. And for some, it's easier to estimate calories by percent of a whole than by multiples of a serving size. (i.e. it's easier for them to determine what half of 1800 calories is than to multiply 225 calories per serving by 4 servings to get the same number)

In principle, I would be okay with having a Nutrition Information box that included something like the 100g column (translated to something Americans could understand of course ) but I also wonder if that's going to create the same confusion as nutrition information by serving size - it's just a larger serving size.

(For blocks of cheese, they could do what they do for butter and put marks on the wrapper indicating where to cut the stick in order to get 2 tablespoons or whatever - only they could make the marks to indicate a serving size. Just a thought.)