Understanding Serving Sizes

Have you paid close attention to the white box on any packaged food that is sold in the US? The little box called "Nutrition Facts" contains a lot of information about the food in the package. 

But how many people bother to read the labels or let alone understand what it says? How about we look at it closely and understand at least the first two pieces of information there? 


The first item on every nutrition facts label is the 'Serving size' followed by 'Servings per container'. These are two very important pieces of information on every label and is the basis for every thing else listed on the label.  

Serving Size gives us valuable information about how much is the recommended amount of food that should be ideally consumed by a person at one time. Did you know that understanding this is very important, because every other piece of information in the label corresponds to this important fact? You see, a package can contain more than one serving of items, but food labels give us information relating to one serving size and not of the whole package. 

But where can we get the information about how much food is there in a package? Well it is given in the next item of information - Servings per container. 

So why is it important to pay attention to these two pieces of information? Well, if we misread this information, we could be in big trouble. If we do not pay attention to the serving size and assume one entire 20 oz bottle of soda in one meal, then the calorie and other nutritional data in the label that we may be putting in our bodies will be way beyond what we think we are consuming - we are super-sizing our drink!

However companies do not want to make it easy for us to follow the labels easily.

• They can be pretty sneaky. Are we not more familiar with measures like cups, pieces or number of items. However information on packages are sometimes given in ounces or grams. Imagine walking around with a weighing scale or measuring container every time we want to eat something. Certainly not practical at all!
• As if this were not enough, companies are sneakier when they trick customers with vague measures like 3/4 of a cup, 1/2 ounce, or unreasonable measures like 130 grams! By pretending that they are being correct they try to fit an unrealistic serving size to measures such as fat, calories, carb and sugar that makes the contents look good. So just to give us a feel that a particular food is only 100 calories may require us to eat 3 1/2 chips! 

That makes me wonder what a portion size is and how different it is from serving size. I plan to look into this a little more and will share my knowledge with you in another blog....

It is always good to familiarize ourselves with misleading labels,  so we don't fall for it........

Notice the odd serving size on this food label!

Notice the unrealistic serving size on this ice cream tub. Imagine being able to stop with just 1/2 cup...

Calorie content is high when serving size is realistic. Usually frosted flakes labels show nutrition facts for 120 calories!

Notice the unrealistic serving size on this box of Frosted Flakes and the corresponding calories....