Tic Tacs claim to have 0 sugar but are almost entirely sugar

Always found the &quot;X per serving&quot; stupid, servings almost never match the actual consumption. Don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s a Europe law or per-state, but in Italy everything has to list nutritional info per 100g(or ml if it&#x27;s liquid), and tic-tacs correctly show their average of 2 calories per candy[1]. It also is a wakeup call to how heavy snacks are, a can of Pringles is almost 900 calories even though they&#x27;d prefer you use their serving size of 30g (about 13 chips)<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.openfoodfacts.org&#x2F;images&#x2F;products&#x2F;400&#x2F;840&#x2F;039&#x2F;9324&#x2F;ingredients_en.51.full.jpg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.openfoodfacts.org&#x2F;images&#x2F;products&#x2F;400&#x2F;840&#x2F;039...</a>

Fortunately, here in the Netherlands (and most parts of Europe I suspect), ingredients are specified as amounts per 100g rather than some arbitrary serving size. This makes it very easy to compare products, for instance to see which one has the lowest percentage of sugars. In the US I had a much harder time comparing cereals for sugar content, as every one would have a different serving size.

I&#x27;m a resident of Germany and I visited the US this year. I&#x27;m quite conscious of my 5 year old&#x27;s sugar intake so I almost obsessively look at the labels looking for the percentage of sugar a product contains at grocery stores.<p>Reading the labels in the US was __extremely aggravating__ due to the serving size bullshit and it gave me a headache after calculating the percentage of sugar in the products after like the 10th product. Here in Germany, the label states the number of grams of sugar for every 100 grams of product, so you don&#x27;t even have to calculate the percentage. Comparing products in the grocery store aisles is really easy in Germany.

Do they really say &quot;sugar free&quot; on the label? I think the claim is that one serving (one tic-tac) has 0g of sugar, which, assuming rounding to the nearest whole number, is probably true.<p>Unfortunately, that might lead someone to say, well, there are 60 tic-tacs in a box, and 60 * 0 is still 0, so I can eat all 60 for 0g of sugar, which of course is not true.

Could you sell a bag of sugar, specifying a serving size of 0.49g, as being sugar free?

Definitely going to reference this fact next time I run into a bug due to an accumulated round off error.<p>I&#x27;ll wait to get out the pitchfork til they <i>actually</i> say &quot;sugar-free&quot; on the side.

Why do they bother listing amounts, in grams, of the constituents of a 0.49g serving, and round any amount less than 0.5g down to 0? Nothing can be non zero in that case!

They can round any number under 5 kilocalories to 0, and a gram of sugar has 4 kcal. Same thing with most sweetener packets, which use sugar as a filler or else there would be less then a single grain of powder per pack. Ironically, there is another fairly common filler: erythritol, which has less calories then sugar, and doesn&#x27;t contribute to blood sugar, but because of how it&#x27;s produced it can&#x27;t be labeled natural.

This is an ancient factoid but people love to bring it around again.<p>The problem is that USA doesn&#x27;t mandate nutrition facts <i>per container</i>, and allows 0.49g &quot;serving sizes&quot;.<p>In Tic Tac&#x27;s defense, the UI design (and adveristing) for the famous &quot;one and a half calorie breath mint&quot; (now 1.9cal) suggests that you should be having only 1 or 2 at a time of these teeny tiny mints.<p>But they know that their customers can&#x27;t control themselves.

Same trick used in these 0 calories flavored waters.

It would be nice if manufacturers always had to provide a &quot;whole package&quot; calorie count on the label.

On the one hand it does have an asterisk and says &lt;0.5g at the end of the label.<p>On the other hand changing the serving size to ~1g would clear this up so there is a lot of rules lawyering going on here.<p>Especially since none of their consumers eats 1 of these things in a serving...

Same idea: 0 calories does not mean 0 calories <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;EN6COaYLS_A" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;EN6COaYLS_A</a>

The federal agencies governing food labeling are very effective. I&#x27;m okay with companies employing people to figure out how to live just barely inside the bounds of legal labeling. To me, that&#x27;s just evidence that the companies couldn&#x27;t change the regulations through lobbying, couldn&#x27;t skirt the regulations by bribing inspectors, and couldn&#x27;t just ignore them and budget for some annual fines.

TIL the FDA uses metric system.

wait until they find out about trans fats!

Wait till you learn about lead free brass

related fun fact: splenda has more calories than sugar. it can say 0 calories because it has less than 5 per serving (packet)

So are we still calling this website twitter?