Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

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.

> 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.

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-...

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com