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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

Famously, Tic Tacs are less than .5g and so contain 0 sugar on the label even though they are pretty much entirely sugar.

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I remember when I was in grad school, I was out with drinks with a bunch of students from the biology department. One of them was talking about finishing up a paper to submit to the FDA on a drug she was testing. She called the FDA "the department of legalized rounding". Another author on her paper was proposing that they could round ".445" to ".45" and then to ".5" so that they could be above a threshold to go on to the next phase. She was horrified, but they were going through the regulations because it wasn't clear that it was prohibited.

It says 94g sugar/100g.

It depends on the jurisdiction. Some places require totals per 100g, whereas others are "per serving", which allows you to say 0 to pretty much everything if that "serving" is 0.5g or less.

USA: https://www.food4less.com/p/tic-tac-berry-flavored-mints/000...

Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/Strawberry-Fields-Singles-Ounce-Pack/d...

Italy: https://worldofeurope.com/shop/hard-candy/product-289/

You must be European. In the US, nutrition facts are per-serving and the amounts are rounded.

A single serving of Tic-Tac is less than 0.5g, and therefore it has 0g of everything.

It does in sane countries where nutrition labels are required to also include the per-100g stats.

But in North America, they only need to show the per-serving column. Combine that with the <0.5g rule and the fact they are allowed to pick the serving size, you end up with tic tacs which don't mention any sugar on their labels.

I see, that is quite malicious. I'm surprised they have a 0.5g rule, why don't they use oz for that?

the US has been partially metricated for a long time. All the American imperial unit definitions are actually pegged to metric and have been since the 19th century. The most common unit of soda is the 2-liter bottle. And so on.

> But in North America, they only need to show the per-serving column.

As someone who is from Europe and tracks their calories, I find it appalling and it makes calorie tracking more inconvenient

Only if you're housing tic tacs by the fistful.

that seems a bit more likely than having just one, all the time

Considering that a fistful is just about an entire package, I'm not so sure.

Tic tacs are supposed to be breath mints, not candy. If you wanted to eat candy why wouldn't you just buy, like, skittles?

If it's meant to be a breath mint, why is it available in flavours other than mint, like Orange, Strawberry & cream and Tropical Adventure?

"breath mint" doesn't have to be mint, it just means small edible candy you put in your mouth to make it smell less like a mouth

If it's 1/2g sugar per Tic Tac and a serving is two Tic Tacs, then we're talking about 4 calories. That's not significant, is it? Just about anything else you eat probably differs from the label by more than 4 cal.

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