18% More, Free!

That system in place to hold companies accountable is the FDA. Problem is, they are too busy with other stuff. But I agree that someone else needs to take over, someone that will do an adequate job.

The best advice that you can use for now in terms of diet is to buy stuff that doesn't have labels (like fresh vegetables, fruit, raw meat, fish, etc.) and prepare the food yourself.

Nutrition? There's nutrition in fast food! wow this is news...and they've hidden it from us!?

I was hungry and got a take-out large French fry the other day, first fast food in about four months at least...that stuff isn't for the usual diet you can get really unhealthy eating it allot and maybe cardiac arrest too.

FDA allows 20% leeway, they provide an average that's only 18% from stated.

Outcome is in specification!

Do you think they would "give away" 18% extra if they didn't think there was some marketing advantage in it? They know that their serve size is being compared to the competition in the shops and if they supplied one that was 18% under, or even at nominal, the shoppers would buy the other brand to "get more for their money" (given the same label values claimed.)

Each of us needs to take responsibility for the outcome that is our body. We have a perfect feedback mechanism (called a mirror and bathroom scales) that gives us actual outcome rather than the implied outcome from counting calories.

I won't go on to rant about the difference between health and weight, or alternatively the difference between nutrition and intake.

There is one very basic equation

(Digeted intake minus "energy burned") times "factor" equals weight change!!

I've used EXACTLY this process to determine weight gain for livestock in feedlots.

Take a closer look! The wording used, seems to suggest a trend has been uncovered, wherein calories in food are significantly under-reported on a regular basis. Closely reading the findings should clue everyone in, that it is not the case.

Consider the frozen food analysis, where the difference in actual and stated calorie content averaged 8% among ten foods. One of the foods analyzed came in at 45% over. This one entree is responsible for more than half of the average content discrepancy.

Removing just that one (very significant) statistical out-lier results in the remaining frozen foods group exhibiting a difference of only 3.5%!

The findings on the fast food portion are similar. The 18% average difference in this 29 food analysis is dominated by just a individual fast food restaurant items. One item is reported as containing 200% of the stated calories, while another is reported as containing 132% of the stated calories.

As with the frozen food analysis, the problem does not suggest a widespread problem, but instead suggests a significant overage in a very few samples.

The papers own abstract says it best, '...These differences ........did not achieve statistical significance due to considerable variability in the degree of underreporting........'

Why all the scare concerning findings which by self admission are other than significant?

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