'Discos grab-bag crisps calorie con – food labelling must improve' blog discussion 19 August 2013 at 11:22AM in Martin's blogs & appearances & MoneySavingExpert in the news 18 replies 3.5K views

Former_MSE_Helen

This is the discussion to link on the back of Martin's blog. Please read the blog first, as this discussion follows it.

Read Martin's "Discos grab-bag crisps calorie con - food labelling must improve" Blog.

Please click 'post reply' to discuss below.

matty_art

The worst culprit here is Twix, which IIRC has the information for each individual biscuit...

LeeUK

Is this like that Jonathan Maitland bloke saying 6 doughnuts are healthier than a fruit smoothie?

I gave up on that bloke when he was describing the World Wide Web as the Internet once.

Gordon_the_Moron

It's annoying but I don't really see how you can stop them doing it. They aren't lying to you, there is 160 odd calories in 28g of the crisps.

I find per 100g information useful as well as per pack/serving depending on what it is. It makes working out whether one snack has a higher percentage fat than another easier.

JimmyTheWig

I also think that the serving size should be related to what a reasonable person would eat.
So often my wife and I will share a supermarket pudding and then look to see the suggested serving is 1/6th of the pudding. I find it hard to believe that most couples would make it last three sittings.
Neither of us are calorie counting, so it doesn't really matter, but I still think it is wrong.

And am I right that a 500ml bottle of Coke is described as two 250ml servings? Who would share one of those?

The other one that annoyed me the other day was a bag of salad which contained "1 and a bit" servings - i.e. the weight of the pack wasn't a multiple of the weight of a serving.

zerog

Smiths is a newsagent and bookstore, so it's perfectly reasonable to sell only small bags of crisps.

Kite2010

Best one is some crisps being advertised on the radio, at only 99 calories per 23g serving.

Who will sit down and weigh out 23 grams of crisps from a 200 gram packet?

Skie_2

Bottles of pop use the same tactic. 250ml serving listed on a 500ml bottle. Same with those cinema sized bags of sweets

Really, they should be forced to list calories for the entire bag/packet. Anything along the lines of what 'a reasonable person would consume' would be stretched and abused simply to get around the rules. Plus if you only ever list the entire contents of individual things it's far easier for someone to work out what half/quarter is and moderate their intake accordingly.

Nada666

Skie wrote: »

Bottles of pop use the same tactic. 250ml serving listed on a 500ml bottle. Same with those cinema sized bags of sweets

Really, they should be forced to list calories for the entire bag/packet. Anything along the lines of what 'a reasonable person would consume' would be stretched and abused simply to get around the rules. Plus if you only ever list the entire contents of individual things it's far easier for someone to work out what half/quarter is and moderate their intake accordingly.

But 250 ml is a normal serving of pop. Most people are stretched to down a 330 ml can never mind a bottle.

And if you are stuffing your face with a 250g (or, rather, 165g - that is a far more annoying shenanigan to me) bag of sweets then why does the calorie content matter in the first place?

Most items contain both per 100 or per 1000 details as well as per 'serving' anyway.

The Discos example is valid, though.

JimmyTheWig

Nada666 wrote: »

But 250 ml is a normal serving of pop. Most people are stretched to down a 330 ml can never mind a bottle.

I disagree.
The vast majority of people who buy 500ml bottles of drink would drink it themselves as one portion.
It's the size of drink that's included in the meal deal in Boots and other places. Why would you get a sandwich for one person, a snack for one person and a drink for two people?

stephen77

labels will start to look different next year.

They are aiming them to be easier for the general public to use.