There's No Iron, Either
You know what I don't get? Why do food labels include items that are not actually in the food. For example: my milk list the amounts and percentages of different nutritional facts which it contains. There are 130 calories. There are five grams of fat, which is 8% of my recommended daily value. There is 140mg of sodium, which is 6% of my daily value, and also somewhat surprising to me. And then it tells me that there are 0 grams of fibre, which is 0% of my daily need. Why do they need to tell me that there is not something in the milk? I can understand, somewhat, if they are telling me there is no lead or arsenic in the milk, though that would make me suspicious of any milk that failed to say it was lead free, but that is a thought for another day. But if there is nothing of a mineral or whatever in the product, why do we need to know? Do people really assume that there is something in the food because it is not on the lable?
Although, I did hear about a woman who tried to sue a cereal company because she felt they had committed fraud by falsely advertising their product as being real fruit when it was not. The cereal was Captain's Crunchberries. The 'fruit' 'shaped' pieces on the box were labelled as being enhanced to show texture, or something that basically said that the picture was not accurate. Also, she had been buying them for four years. So I guess people need the blindingly obvious pointed out to them sometimes.
Well check out the next chapter.
P.S. The judge threw the case out of court, in case you were wondering.
posted by Pants since 1986 @ 10:42 p.m.
2 comments
2 Comments:
Two thoughts.
First, some foods (cereals especially) seem to have a standard list of nutrients, and some of them are zero. This makes sense to me, because you're usually comparing this cereal with that cereal, and it's helpful to have a standard format. That's not really what you're talking about, but I thought I should mention it.
The second thought is, I wonder if there is some fiber in milk, but not enough to be measured with the standard measure. Fiber, if I recall correctly, is measured using whole grams (don't remember seeing decimal places). So I wonder if there is .1-.49 grams of fiber in milk, which gets rounded down to zero, but they still have to list it because technically it's there. I've heard of that happening with nutritional labels.
But if there really is no fiber in milk, then it's really dumb to have it listed. Or maybe they've just found that lots of people think milk has fiber, and they just want to make it clear that it doesn't. Don't know, really, but there are some ideas.
False advertising sucks. Yesterday I skipped breakfast and I was invited to attend a grand opening for lunch. On the invitation there was a picture of a huge outdoor BBQ with chicken, steak and kabobs which looked very appealing. At the grand opening they served burnt weiners on dry bread, the traditional hot dog. Don't get me wrong, I love a good old fashioned hot dog, but this was not your traditional hotdog. More of a charcoaled crusty roll. But, I was hungry.
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