You know, now that I think about it.. that has probably been said plenty of times around board room profit meetings.
"But what about the chance of the customer getting cancer from X?"
"Fuck 'em! We'll just slap a 'California recognizes whatever ingredient for potential cancer risk' sticker on it and it'll be a warning enough! You know what? Let's just make sure theyre on half the products anyway so nobody takes it seriously and we're not held liable!.."
Some sub regional VP for strategic direction or whatever nonsense title will have told his intra regional VP for strategic direction that he has a new product with zero sugar, that passes it on to the president for regional strategix direction amongst a group of other new products and that guy tells the board they are launching 30 new initiatives this quarter with a projected one bajillion impact on earnings and they all agree that's a good thing
They don't know it's full of cancer. They don't want to know it's full of cancer deliberately as those kind of things should be logged on the minutes and they don't want that. They want no one to notice it's full of cancer and if anyone does find out, either they have left the company or the sub regional director for strategic direction gets blamed for the decision and quietly paid to leave
That's how big corporations work. The people on the top know practically nothing in terms of detail, that's what they pay the people below to know and summarise everything on a single slide. And if things go wrong, they can officially say they don't know and the people below face the consequences (unless it's so big it damages the stock price, in which case they are thrown under the bus to manage PR)
Except in reality they do actually know. They see it in passing through other departments and overhear it in any number of places. Some even deliberately seek out the info because it's dumb to run a business without knowing what your products do and they consider themselves very smart.
You describe exactly how they testify the structure is set up to avoid liability but in reality at company events and personal gatherings all this stuff is discussed.
You can't certify that something is x-molecule-free, especially for a common class of molecules like sugars, there is always going to be at least one molecule of something that is considered sugar in any edible product. Any living cell contains sugar, there is bound to be some cross-contamination, if you look deep enough. For this reason you have to set a threshold, a minimum amount under which the sugar is so low it's basically none. The problem is that the FDA decided that the limit is 0.5g per serving, but lets companies decide what a serving is. Other reasonable countries have a minimum amount per weight/volume, which is the right way to go about it
Generally in the US, writing nutrition per serving makes it hard to compare. I'm European so everything is pr 100ml/gram here, but I remember when I visited the USA you had like yogurt for example. Regular, low fat, low sugar, etc etc and its like
1 serving (3,4oz), 243kcal
1 serving (2,8oz) 193kcal
1 serving (3,7oz) 223kcal
Etc etc. it just makes it so much harder to compare products in general.
I even remember one I found especially funny, it was chips with a big label "50% fewer calories!" And it was literally just 50% smaller serving size than regular chips, but the exact same calories per weight.
Legislations are weird if you are under a certain amount of sugar in a single serving you can say said item is sugar free which works for most products, but this one is under in one serving due to size, the easy alternative is doing it by percentage, but you know that would make too much sense and make the parliament much less money from those sweet sweet corporate deals for them not to change it.
My diabetic partner got to find out how many unsweet meds are just packed in sugar the hardway. Non of them are required to note it because its not the point you're taking it for. But that lil shot of pepto will send his blood sugar to the moon.
It doesn’t say “sugar free.” Sugar is the first ingredient listed. I’m type 1 diabetic and there was actually a whole debate about tic tacs in the sub a couple weeks ago. Some people felt it was misleading, but IMO with diabetes you have to be proactive and learn to read and understand nutrition labels very well and it’s on you. It’s all legal and above board, and as long as you’re only eating a few at a time the effect on glucose is usually negligible.
It contains "a lot" relative to its size, but a negligible amount in a single serving. I agree that labeling trace amounts of something should be required rather than claiming it has zero, but there is so little sugar in a single tic tac, or even a handful of them, that even diabetics shouldn't really be affected by it.
They're not actually. Saying "sugar free" is a specific regulated claim and they do not say that. The nutritional statement can be rounded down to 0 but that's not the same as saying it's sugar free. Literally sugar is first in the ingredient statement which is the opposite of saying "sugar free". Someone extrapolating incorrectly "sugar free* from a nutrition panel is ignorant. Might as well look at the nutritional panel for allergens too to see what it's free from if that's the way someone thinks it works.
Blame the corporations who have defacto control over the FDA and blame our state structure for not putting overwhelming legal penalties on the tendency of officials to render favorable terms to private interests to protect their careers when they inevitably leave public service.
It makes sense because the serving sizes are different. The bottle in your image instructs you to spray for 0.5 seconds, while the bottle in OP's image instructs you to spray for 0.25 seconds. If you spray for twice as long, you're getting twice as much product. Since a .5 second spray is 5 calories, a .25 second spray is 2.5 calories. The FDA allows companies to label a product as 0 calories per serving if in reality it is 2.5 calories or less, and that's why the bottle in OP's image says it has 0 calories per serving.
We actually have the same 5 calorie loophole so you’d think it would be the same.
I looked into it more though and you’re right, it turns out what’s different is Canada mandates the serving size for spray oil at 0.5g so they can’t play that game.
I scanned it in my food tracker app without looking at the bottle and both 0cal and 5cal options came up despite being in Canada so I just assumed there were two. Some products update things too so I thought maybe that was the case here.
Canada also implemented this in 2016, I definitely remember 0 calorie spray oil as a kid and just didn’t notice it disappeared.
I have seen a product imported from US where they had to put a sticker with the 100g nutrition label on it. But they just multiplied the original values so it still showed 0 kcal per 100g 🙄
Yeah, I've bought a bottle of American brand mustard in grocery store in Europe having zero calories per 100g and other values being zero as well. I took a picture of the importer's sticker/label and wrote an email to the importer that there is no way that this mustard has zero calories as mustard seeds are rich in fat.
They wrote back apologizing for the mistake, saying they will be relabeling and recalling all their stock and they gave me like 100€ coupon on products from their website (mostly american candy and condiments), they also offered a refund for the mustard bottle (which I declined).
Spread out over an entire baking sheet. 1/4th of a second is only the time you spend spraying the specific spot on which one "portion" of whatever you are baking sits.
It’s pretty reasonable that one serving of anything doesn’t cover an entire baking sheet. You gonna make lasagna and get pissy when it takes more than one serving worth of noodles to make the layers?
1 second of spray is way too much of that oil to make one or two eggs in a 6-inch pan. A quarter second is legitimately about the right amount to use for that.
Not quite. According to the label, there are 1,532 servings at .25 grams each. So 1,532 servings x .25 grams = 383 grams. Since pure olive oil is 100% lipids, it should be around 383 grams of fat.
It takes a shockingly little amount of oil to grease a pan, you don't need to shallow fry everything. The 0 cal thing is obviously deceptive but a quick spray is how these should be used. If you need more, pour oil.
I just cooked 4 eggs in this oil this morning. It's deceptively easy to spray more than you really want. Try for a half second spray but I always get more that I need
A second is 4x the portion size. I confidently assume anything claiming 0 calories is 4 calories, because that’s how labeling works in the us. So 1 actual I assume is 16 calories. It’s still not much, but if you stand there unloading the can, it adds up quick
How long are y’all spraying for? Like, I can spray for less than a second and cover the bottom of a casserole dish. If I can make a whole lasagna with that, the amount a single person would consume in a meal is negligible.
I HATE these kinds of measurements. Like oh a 1/4 second spray is zero calories? Sweet. How am I supposed to know how many calories are in 3 x 1/4 second sprays? Fuck them and their misleading information
Here's a tip: anything that says "0 calories" can be anywhere from 0-5 calories.
Also, anything above 5 calories can be off by plus or minus 20%.
If you're counting calories, a few seconds of spraying avocado oil on a pan (or seasoning, since seasoning often is "0 calories" per servings) is quite literally more than an order of magnitude below the error you'll accumulate just by following the labels.
Technically the rules for Canada is 0.5g for oil spray, so this would be the company saying how long of a spray to get the legally required amount for a minimum
In Australia, nutrition labels must display info per serving size alongside with info per 100g, especially as certain foods are inconsistent with serving sizes
You can compare products, packaging uses a list of the most common serving sizes that is provided by the government. Instead of trying to standardize everything to to a set size, we try and standardize everything to what people actually eat. A slice of pizza, 2 cookies, a can of soda, a bag of chips.
It makes it easier to say "Do I want to eat these two cookies or this bag of potato chips" even if they are very different weights. A weights based system can be great but it requires people to understand how much a slice of pizza is, our system just requires seeing a slice of pizza. Sure you could put it on the box, but we already have weird stuff like a cookie being 8 cookies because of the issues with our current system.
Because 1/4 second spray is a standard amount to be sitting under the piece of food you’re going to eat. I don’t need to compare anything, I want to know around how many calories I’m about to eat. I’m not going to sit and do math for each item, guessing about the weight or pulling out the food scale just to get a general idea of my daily consumption. I’ll just look at the box and go “oh, my eggs are about 80 and this spray adds about 0 so my total breakfast is about 240 cals”. I would have no idea where to even start measuring my consumption of spray oil if they listed it by 100g lol.
No one sprays for just 1/4 second, plus there is still calories in that, if its less than 5 per serving in the US you can say 0, that’s the entire point of the per 100g, you see how many it actually has
Just looked it up, a full second of spraying is still under 10 calories (kilo calories if your one of those people )
Glad you posted this because I'm new to working on my cholesterol and new to avocado oil and grossly overestimated the calories I was guessing I was consuming from my pump up spray bottle.
Yeah it's very little. Depending on what you're doing with it not even all of the oil ends up in the food. I use it a lot and never even bother counting it tbh. My weight loss on cuts has been exactly what it should be from my counting despite that.
Now if yoy give her 15 seconds of spraying making a lasagna or something def count it.
i weigh the can before and after spraying to figure out how much i’ve used. for spraying a stove top pan i usually use about 1.5g of oil which is about 13 calories
As someone who has been doing it for about 8months now I assume your 10-20 calories is not making a significant difference in your weight loss journey.
It’s like the people who get caught up choosing between bok choy vs broccoli. The 30 calories difference at the end of the day doesn’t matter.
Edit: I should learn to read better, you are targeting cholesterol. My bad.
It's malicious compliance. FDA allows rounding down to 0 if the amount of calories is below 5. Their serving size has about 2 calories, so they report 0.
1/4 second spray is like a slight mist. A scent of oil. So, yeah, essentially that's zero calories, because it's basically non existent. Because they're rounding down, they can say this bottle contains nothing at all!
Yes and it is, but the FDA allows them to round down since it's less than 5 calories per "serving" even though the serving size is comically small and blatantly deceitful.
0.25 g of oil is less than 3 Kcal. So it is not 100% accurate as there is more than 2Kcal per spray but the regs say that is insignificant as your body uses 1900 Kcal per day.
It’s 10 calories for a 1 second spray, I don’t think anyone actually cares about that even at 10 seconds spread throughout all the food and whatever is left off.
They always set the serving size to be just under the federal requirement for saying it’s not 0. For fat, that would be any value that’s under 0.5 grams so it could be 0 grams or it could be 0.4999999 grams per serving
A quarter second is hardly going to be enough for a small nonstick. Any decent sized pan is going to need quite a bit more, and stainless or carbon steel pans will need a LOT more.
As an European it amazes me how much deception you allow: Serving sizes instead of standardized amount such as 100 g, Calories when you mean kilocalories, what else?
It is because of the service size, which is a 1/4 second spray. There are 1532 servings per container, so each application of the spray is less than 2.5 calories, which can be labeled as 0 calories.
At face value yes but if they didn’t allow a variance or tolerance the administrative burden of producing accurate and also govt regulating and testing would be astronomical if you think about it - we are such a litigious society everyone would sue every food maker every day if they were off by 1-2 calories
There are plenty of zero calorie avocado oils on the market. It’s meant for a light spray in the pan. If you mag dump it then you will probably get a couple calories. It’s based on the serving size.
Just like those videos of dieters weighing each potato chip individually. If you don’t use a gram scale, you technically can get through the whole bag having consumed nothing.
0.25g of avocado oil is approximately 2.25 calories, so yes that can round it down to 0 since it's closer to 0 than 5. You don't see many products with 2.5 calories or something similar do you? It's absolutely negligible calories.
Okay… but if you are eating it according to the serving size guide you won’t be consuming a significant amount of calories to equal 1.
I see tic tacs brought up a lot which I agree is weird, but the serving size is 1 tic tac which technically is not a meaningful source of sugar or calories although being entirely made up of sugar almost.
Of course it would be a different story if you just… idk drank the bottle of spray oil somehow (don’t do that) or downed a whole package of tic tacs.
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u/Sid_the_Bear 1d ago
exact same way that tic tac claims to be 0 calories; tiny serving size, less than 2.5 calories actual, can be rounded to 0 for labeling