whatilearned
Read more: https://www.insider.com/calorie-labels-arent-accurate-how-to-eat-healthy-diet-2021-5
TIL nutritional labels can be up to 20% inaccurate, according to the FDA guidelines, and still be considered in compliance. For example, a serving of Greek yogurt labeled to contain 100 calories could actually be anywhere between 80 to 120 calories.
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I’m going to start rounding everything down 20% and convince myself that I’m still on my diet.
Keep in mind that all nutritional counts are averages. This isn’t an issue of the FDA being incompetent, lax, or whatever all else.
If you take the raw ingredients of an apple pie, each of those agricultural components are affected by genetics, the growing season and location, time harvested, factory production, and storage. No two apples will be the exact same, even on the same tree. Nutritional databases have taken samples from many apples and averaged them together to come up with an entry for “apple,” which is what you’d see in a food logger. Add up all of those potential inaccuracies into the apple pie and you could approach 20% just from natural variation in a *homemade apple pie*.
Any product is going to have some variation as production occurs. Variations in the raw ingredients will occur over time, and even differences with machinery during priduction runs can cause fluctuations in the final products. Testing and re-printing the lables for every single production run would be cost/time prohibitive to any business.
It’s all good, I measure my food energy in horse power-seconds.
I can’t believe this is a surprise to anyone – when you factor in product settling and inaccuracy of home measuring devices it is all just an estimate.
I had a yoghurt yesterday that was ‘sugarfree’ but still incredible sweet, and the ingredients lists five artificial sweeteners.