Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

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>Nutrition Labels in India are strange. Many drinks (like refrigerated shakes etc.) have nutritional information per 100 millilitres, whereas the actual bottle is say 330 millilitres, and the "serving size" will be defined as 250 millilters.

Why is it strange? The metric system? It's exactly the same in Europe. Nutritional information is per 100ml/g, so that you can easily understand compare nutritional values.

>Most people are not that careful anyway - they might glance at the nutritional label, and see that the sugars are only 7.5% and think: that's pretty good, I'll have one, not seeing the 100 ml gotcha.

No mate, people in India and in EU are used to looking at the nutritional information per 100g/l as that lets you easily compare nutritional value between foodstuffs packaged in different weights, and figure out what's healthy/unhealthy, for example I saw Coca-Cola and most soft drinks are about 10g/100ml sugar, meaning that 10% of the product is sugar, so that's my yardstick of unhealthiness, or that most chips/crisps have around 30g/100g fats, aka 30% fats, so I seek out variants that have much less.

Having only the nutritional value listed per random serving size or the entire product like in the US is confusing because I can't easily compare sugar/fat percentage content of different products of different weights.

The advantage of doing it per 100 ml/g, means it's easy to compare foods for their nutritional values. The US way is completely opaque.

Exactly. I don't understand why in the US it's also not standard to show nutritional values per OZ or something.

As someone who lives in the US and reads every nutrition label to determine how much sugar / carbohydrate I'm taking in, my intuition is that it would be much harder in practice to do so if it were per 100 ml/g or by oz or something. Sure it would be easier to compare products, but the math would be come much harder to determine what you actually consumed, wouldn't it?

I mean, it's annoying that they do things like '3.5 servings per container', but at least you only have to multiply by 3.5 (I would just prefer a total on each container). If it were 'there are 5g of carbs/sugar per 100g of material,' it would end up being an extra step to determine total grams, divide it by a potentially wonky number or round and divide, then multiply the 5g times the resulting number. Sure it's not that much harder, but it would really add up throughout the day if you were tracking your diet. And IME that's a much more common use case than comparing nutritional value of different products by comparing the macronutrient makeup in grams from the labels, which I've actually never done once

One thing I find wild in EU is that apparently adding alcohol to a drink obviates the need for a nutrition label. A can of coke needs to declare its sugar content but no need for the precanned Jack&Coke from the same supermarket fridge.

Yeah, that's indeed a stupid loop-hole in the EU. Although i suppose most people wishing to get wasted don't care much about the nutritional value same how smokers don't acare about the cancer warnings with gross diseased pictures on them.

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