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Irritation - serving size

Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2008 2:19 pm
by gsabc
Irritation, because my peeves aren't pets.

I've been running across too many issues with food serving sizes recently. Special K, which I like in plain form, now has new flavors, such as chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, etc., all with some form of flavor bits in them. But they have the same calories as the plain! How? Simple. The serving size for plain is 1 cup. The serving size for all the others is 3/4 cup.

Recipe for "Guilt-free Lasagna" at myrecipes.com, less than 300 calories per serving. It's made in a 13 x 9 baking dish. The recipe makes 8 servings. That works out to a rectangle a little more than 1" x 1-1/2". I hope you have lots of salad to go with it. No dressing, of course.

Healthy Choice chicken noodle soup in the microwave bowl. Open it to heat it up, and there's no way to reseal it. But are the "nutrition facts" on the basis of a serving size being one entire container? Nope. There are "about 2" servings in the 14 ounce bowl. In fairness, they do include a statement saying "This entire package contains 170 calories." vs. 110 for the "serving size" of 1 cup. Only the calories are mentioned for the full package, not the sodium (20% of daily in the 1 cup) or anything else.

I won't go into another irritation, the case of the incredible shrinking contents, where the same size package contains less of the product. For the same price. Can you even BUY a full half-gallon of ice cream anymore?

Re: Irritation - serving size

Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2008 2:26 pm
by MarleysGh0st
In general, I agree with your irritation. However...
gsabc wrote:Recipe for "Guilt-free Lasagna" at myrecipes.com, less than 300 calories per serving. It's made in a 13 x 9 baking dish. The recipe makes 8 servings. That works out to a rectangle a little more than 1" x 1-1/2". I hope you have lots of salad to go with it. No dressing, of course.
Wouldn't one serving of that be a rectangle 13" x 1-1/8"?

Re: Irritation - serving size

Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2008 2:33 pm
by gsabc
MarleysGh0st wrote:In general, I agree with your irritation. However...
gsabc wrote:Recipe for "Guilt-free Lasagna" at myrecipes.com, less than 300 calories per serving. It's made in a 13 x 9 baking dish. The recipe makes 8 servings. That works out to a rectangle a little more than 1" x 1-1/2". I hope you have lots of salad to go with it. No dressing, of course.
Wouldn't one serving of that be a rectangle 13" x 1-1/8"?
You're right. I was dividing both dimensions by 8, which would be 64 pieces. So a serving would be ~14.6 square inches, a bit over 3" x 4-1/2".

[Emily Litella]Oooh, that's different. That's very different. Never mind.[/EL]

Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2008 2:42 pm
by andrewjackson
You already came up with the same solution I did.

Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2008 3:31 pm
by peacock2121
Dang those people!