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Comment by xhruso00 | Hacker News Reader

"In addition to an ad ban, the ministry announced that sugary drinks would also be required to display a color-coded, front-of-pack nutrition label to list nutritional quality and sugar content." I like Japanese/Taiwanese approach which list percentage of fruit juice (front-of-pack). And manufacturers can't cheat with substitutes like apple cause it doesn't count. This is way more useful for consumers to decide what they want. In countries like Malaysia I have no idea what i am buying (sugar water vs real fruit juice)

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The UK has a similar "traffic light" system[0] on their foods. I cannot speak to everyone, but for me seeing red salt makes me look again at other options. It is a gentle nudge but helps.

By contrast US food labeling is an anti-pattern. "Serving size" seems arbitrary and makes it impossible to compare foods even directly next to one another on the shelf (plus they're intentionally unrealistic, like a single chocolate bar having two "servings").

[0] https://assets.bupa.co.uk/~/media/images/healthmanagement/to...

It would be so simple to fix the serving size issue, too: just force labels to list nutrition information for the whole thing as well as per serving!

Arbitrary serving sizes are kind of useless though. In an ideal world, most foods would list nutrition information in two units: per container, and per 100g. You'd be able to tell at a glance a) what you're buying, and b) how it compares to similar items. Unfortunately that will not happen in the United States any time soon.

I dunno. 100g of butter is a lot.

But you could easily compare multiple brands because they will not have different package or serving sizes to trick the system. Here in germany 100g nutrition labels have to be added, made-up serving sizes can be used too if they want, but 100g nutrition tables are enforced.

In 2016 the rules were updated for certain package sizes to require just that. You see it on almost all >1 to <5 serving packages now, but its not legally required till next year. You can see a bunch of examples on page 6, 10, and 13 - 15 here: https://www.fda.gov/media/99203/download

And in the US, they started using 3 "different kinds of sugars" to make sugar appear lower on the list of ingredients that are sorted by quantity... i.e.: sugar, high fructose corn syrup & corn syrup

"They" started that at least 20 years ago, probably 30+ years ago. I saw it myself in 1999.

thanks for the info., I didn't know when it started, but either way, it sounds wrong... pretty sure it wouldn't affect most recipes to use only one kind of sugar

Different sugars affect properties like texture and moisture retention differently, and aren't equivalently sweet.

Do you have a concrete example for the moisture retention case?

Cookies? Swap brown for white in a recipe and you'll wind up with a wildly different product, and they're 95% the same (white is almost pure sucrose, brown has a small amount of fructose and other traces).

Syrups contain quite a bit of water, and differ a bunch in constituent sugars.

> seeing red salt makes me look again at other options.

Do you have high blood pressure? My understanding is sodium isn't a concern unless high BP is an issue.

Oh the UK can still do that and achieve impossible (or at least daft) serving sizes. Thankfully they all have to show per 100g as well.

I've a wrapper of a 200g chocolate bar here - sadly now all eaten. Nutrition is per 100g and per 40g serving, except there were 8 rows of 4 chunks in the bar. So a 40g "serving" is 6.4 chunks! Traffic lights on the front are based on the same 40g.

A sane and actually achievable serving would have to be 50g.

Japanese have only the nutriction stats. I was talking about this (look at 1% of peach): https://www.japantrendshop.com/img/cocacola/coca-cola-peach-...

Fruit juice is different from sugar water in some ways (for example, apple juice has sorbitol, which promotes bowel movement), but in my view the differences don't matter and they should both be covered under this ban. That much sugar with no bulk is just unnatural and should be viewed as a dessert.

It's always nice when other people decide what I should eat on the assumption that I can't consume in healthy moderation.

Banning advertising doesn't stop you eating what you want.

There's no difference between "fruit juice" and regular soda.

The fiber is gone so "fruit juice" will be as easily absorbed as regular juice and the sugar in it is just as potent.

You could argue that "fruit juice" has some vitamins in it, but due to processing much of that is gone, plus you can fortify soda with vitamins as well.

"Fruit juice" doesn't protect you from overeating calories, which is the primary problem with sugary drinks. Think of how it's some work to eat an apple and you'll fill fuller. A glass of apple juice however is the equivalent of 6 apples and you can drink it in a matter of seconds without doing anything to curb your hunger.

If you want fruits, just eat the damn fruits, or otherwise take a vitamin C pill.

I am not saying fruit juice sugar is better. I am saying this kind of information on packaging is useless (because it's at the back of packaging) and I want to know if the "Peach Cola" has anything to do with peach. In Japan/Taiwan it is written that there is 0% of peach. Once you experience this you will love it. Especially when you speak ZERO japanese or taiwanese

Fruit juice is only marginally better. Most of the good stuff in fruit is removed when you just extract the juice.

I pointed that there should be other information in the front. Consider "Peach Cola" which is sold in Japan. It has 0 sugar but also 0% of peach. I prefer to see fruit juice amount especially when I don't understand Japanese but I can see picture of peach and percentage of peach inside.

>>In countries like Malaysia I have no idea what i am buying (sugar water vs real fruit juice)

In a lot of countries it's safe to bet that you get fruit flavored sugared water. Corruption makes it impossible for consumers to have any chance of real products. Many on HN might not understand but a phone call from "above" can turn away any inspection, and they don't dare to bother you again.

I'm all for choice, let people drink pepsi /coke all they want but let's have full disclosure. Allow them to advertise, as long as they say that it's all junk. I

Doesn't the nutritional label list "glucose/fructose/sucrose content" though? (I don't know, I'm just asking here)

Nutritionally, simple sugars are the same whether they come from fruit or syrups. Taste-wise they are different, but nutritional labeling is primarily concerned with the former rather than the latter.

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