So check this out! I’m trying to be good and limit my calories but I had not pre-planned my lunch meal. After spending about 4 hours at the dentist having a porcelain inlay restoration on one of my molars I then drove the truck to the local oil change place for the annual inspection.
Now, it’s around 1:00 pm and I’m getting hungry so I head home and open up a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup condensed. A quick glance at the nutritional label and seems to be okay, only 100 calories per serving. So I heat up a pot of this soup with skim milk and look at the label again, the serving size is ½ cup.
Who are they kidding, 4 fluid ounces of this soup is ONE SERVING! I broke out laughing because it seems to be another marketing trick to sell their supposedly healthy product. I can hear the marketing and sales reps…. “We have to keep the calories per serving below or at 100 so people will buy it.” Also, based on this portion size the can yields 2 ½ servings. Now how many of you are going to eat a half serving, or 2 fluid ounces of this soup, do you know that 2 ounces is only 4 tablespoons.
The real headache was that I wanted to eat half the soup, so I had to run some manual calculations to convert the nutritional values based on 2.5 servings per can to 2 servings per can. What a mess! Get real Campbell’s (CSC Brands), you really are not that concerned with our nutritional needs.
Funny too, my son bought a bakery item of two large muffins from the store the other day. I looked on the nutritional label and it stated there were 6 servings in the container, so let’s see, 2 muffins = 6 servings, right! And get this, each serving was 265 calories, so each muffing weighted in at almost 800 calories EACH! This is just another marketing ploy of the grocery store to get their calories per serving way below the actual realistic serving. Many consumers are getting fooled, but many of us are not, and in the process are getting weary of the irresponsible nature of the food marketing techniques. There seems to be no set standard on portion sizes and what constitutes a healthy portion.
Do any of you have the same issues with servings or portions on product nutritional labels? If so, share your story, I’d love to hear them!
1 response so far ↓
1 South of the Border // Aug 7, 2008 at 11:00 pm
We tend to ignore the nutritional labeling for just the reasons that you mention. That goes along with ignoring the sundry and various warnings for cancer causing ingredients, danger to pregnant women, and damage to the ozone layer.
Fortunately for us, with time not really an issue, I suspect that a very high portion of our diet is made from fresh (or at least non-processed) ingredients.
Of course, seeing as how I’m not losing any weight maybe I ought to pay more attention……
Regards
Ed