A Tidbit special: When is a serving not a serving?

Editor's note: Mr. Tidbit, the Taste section's supermarket browser, today takes a closer-than-usual look at what constitutes a serving of some products. He finds some that seem inconsistent, but that -- if examined closely -- are so consistent in their inconsistency that they are, in fact, consistent.

When the new food labeling regulations were announced in 1992 (time flies while you're having fun), one of the problem areas those rules addressed was serving size. Previously, any number of products were labeled with serving sizes that were based more on a desire to make the nutrition data look good than on anything like reality.

The standard 12-ounce can of pop, for example, with about 140 calories and 40 grams of sugar, typically was labeled as containing two servings, each with about 70 calories and 20 grams of sugar. Almost nobody in this solar system drank only half a can as a serving. The 1992 regulations established that a standard serving of canned pop is a can.

In numerous other situations, too, the 1992 labeling standards introduced reasonably realistic serving sizes: an ounce of potato chips (although maybe that's a bit low if a big bag is available), a whole can of ready-to-serve soup, about a cup or about an ounce of most cereals, two or three cookies (an ounce), and half a cup of ice cream (perhaps a bit low, but conceivably in the ballpark).

The result has been that most folks who examine nutrition labels probably don't regularly look at the serving sizes on which the other numbers are based, assuming that the listed amounts of fat, sodium and the like are at least in the neighborhood of the amounts of those nutrients they will get in the serving they actually eat.

Mr. Tidbit, too, has made that assumption for almost five years now. But having noticed an obvious anomaly or two, he has begun to include serving size in the glances he casts at nutrition labels. That has produced some surprises, of several types.

Unrealistic serving sizes (or sizes that are unrealistic in the use you make of the product):

Salad Eatos, "the alternative crouton" (wheat-free, gluten-free, made with organic red or blue corn), seem to be, essentially, seasoned Fritos. The front of the bag has a "low fat" badge, and the label shows them to have only 35 calories and 2 grams of fat per serving. Wow! And they're tasty and crunchy as all getout! How do they make anything like corn chips, which in their Frito-Lay incarnation they have 160 calories and 10 grams of fat per serving, so darn healthful?

Well, they don't. The serving size of Salad Eatos is only ¼ ounce -- because they're sold as croutons; if they were sold as snack chips the serving size would be 1 ounce, and they'd have the typical 8 to 10 grams of fat per serving. So sprinkle just a few of these (or Fritos) on your salad for 2 grams of fat, or eat them (or Fritos) as snack chips with 10 grams of fat.

Pork rinds is another snack that appears to be surprisingly low in fat and calories. Not because they're sold as croutons, though, so Mr. Tidbit can't explain it as readily. He knows only that on the several brands he examined, the serving size was ½ ounce, not the 1 ounce that is almost universal for chips, pretzels, cheese puffs, etc. So the label shows 80 calories and 5 grams per serving, not the 160 calories and 10 grams of fat per ounce that pork rinds contain. Maybe fans of pork rinds really eat only half an ounce; it's a mystery to Mr. Tidbit.

Fat-free half-and-half represents a slightly different case. There is a tiny amount of fat in it, but the rules, quite reasonably, allow products with less than half a gram of fat per serving to be labeled fat-free. The serving of fat-free half-and-half in its intended use, as a coffee creamer, is 2 tablespoons. According to one manufacturer, Land O'Lakes, a 2-tablespoon serving of its fat-free half-and-half indeed contains only 0.38 grams of fat.

But fat-free half-and-half is a pretty good substitute for regular half-and-half in much larger quantities in some recipes -- soups, for example, perhaps with a little vinegar or hot sauce added to take off the slightly sweet edge from the product's high-fructose corn syrup. Using the Land O'Lakes' number as typical, a 1-cup serving of fat-free half-and half could add a little more than 3 grams of fat to a bowl of potentially "fat-free" soup.

Fat-free cream cheese is not a problem in this regard, either: Kraft wouldn't tell Mr. Tidbit exactly how much fat is in it, but even if it contains the limit of half a gram of fat per 2-tablespoon serving, you would have to eat a 6-ounce (¾-cup) slab of it to get above the 3 grams of fat that is the ceiling for a serving of a low-fat food.

Apparently inconsistent serving sizes:

Examples of this aspect of the problem are taken from the candy, cookie and snack-cake departments because that is where Mr. Tidbit spends much of his time. A similar situation may well exist in the tofu aisle, for example, but Mr. Tidbit hasn't noticed it.

The most common apparent inconsistency, but the easiest to understand, is in such areas as number of cookies. It makes sense that when very large cookies are under consideration, a serving is one cookie, and when the cookies are small or very small, the serving should be some standard weight -- and it appears that is the case: The number of non-huge cookies in a serving is the number that comes closest to weighing 1 ounce (28 grams).

That does produce some apparent anomalies, including the one that brought this entire deal to Mr. Tidbit's attention:

Huh?

It turns out that the plain-chocolate Milano cookies are lighter than the mint, orange or double-chocolate Milanos, which have extra filling. So a serving of regular Milanos is three (11-gram) cookies -- 34 grams of cookie, each cookie contributing one third of the serving's 10 grams of fat (about 3 grams each). The mint, orange and double-chocolate Milanos weigh 2 or 3 grams more each, so it takes only two cookies to total about an ounce, so a serving is two cookies, and each cookie contributes half of the serving's 8 grams of fat (about 4 grams each).

Clear? The one whose label shows more fat per serving is the one with less fat per cookie.

This led Mr. Tidbit to examine candy and snack-cake labels. The candy labels appeared inconsistent at first. A serving of Milk Duds, for example, is 13 pieces (40 grams), and one of Dots is 12 pieces, 43 grams, but a serving of Pearson Nips is 7 pieces (15 grams). Eventually, however, the pattern emerged:

It appears to Mr. Tidbit, after many hours of grueling research, that a serving of candy is about 15 grams if it's hard candy (the kind you leave in your mouth for a while), but about 40 grams if it's soft candy (the kind you chew and swallow). Indeed, he was able to verify this by noting a least-possible-difference case: A serving of LifeSavers is 4 pieces (16 grams); a serving of Gummy LifeSavers is 10 pieces (39 grams).

If there's a rule for snack cakes, however, it has eluded Mr. Tidbit. Here are the serving sizes for some Hostess snack cakes whether purchased (individually wrapped) in boxes of 8 or 10, or wrapped in packages of 2 or 3: Twinkies: 1 (43 grams); Ding Dongs: 2 (80 grams); HoHos: 3 (84 grams), cupcakes: 1 (49 grams).

Mr. Tidbit is going to walk away from that one, shaking his head. In compensation for his failure to make sense of it, he will toss in another example that he can't understand, but that does not involve his sweet tooth:

A serving of frozen fried potatos (French fries, Tater Tots and hash browns) is 3 ounces (84 grams); a serving of frozen mashed potatoes is 5 ounces (140 grams) and a serving of frozen sweet potatoes is about 6 ounces (170 grams).

Servings not as served:

This is a much more common situation, involving not so much serving size as serving contents. It involves products to which you add other ingredients before serving: cake mix, for example, or soup mix.

Every nutrition label lists, in its lefthand column, the amounts of fat, sodium and other nutrients per serving in the mix as packaged (4 grams of fat, for example). To the right, on every nutrition label, are those amounts expressed as percentages of the daily guideline value (4 grams of fat is 6 percent of the daily guideline for fat).

Beyond that, the amount of information on labels for mixes varies considerably. An example of the most extreme form of information deficit is Produce Partners cream of potato soup mix. To prepare the 4 servings of soup from the envelope of dry mix, you add quite a bit of stuff -- 2 potatoes, 3 cups of milk and 2 tablespoons of butter. The nutrition label lists only what's in the envelope -- some spices -- and says a serving has 25 calories, no fat and 3 grams of carbohydrate.

That accounting is perhaps amusing, but it's completely useless. If you have access to some nutrition tables you can learn that the soup as prepared (with 2-percent milk) will, in fact, have 210 calories, 9 grams of fat and 21 grams of carbohydrate per serving -- information nowhere on the label.

Canned condensed soup normally is prepared by adding water, but the nutrition labels on Campbell's broccoli cheese soup, and other varieties that require that you add milk instead, do not indicate anything about the nutritive effect of adding that milk. (If it's 2-percent milk, each serving has 65 more calories and 2½ more grams of fat than shown on the label.)

More typically, on a Pillsbury cake mix, for example, figures for the mix as prepared (including the eggs and oil you add) are provided, but only for calories and calories from fat. Other numbers are listed only as percentages of the daily value (in a third column, to the right of the other two), not as grams of fat and so forth. That's what the little asterisk next to the grams of fat number indicates: "*Amount in mix." If you look only at the first numbers (grams of fat, milligrams of cholesterol and so forth) and not at the percentages -- which is a perfectly valid way to compare every food except mixes -- you will not be evaluating the product you're eating, only what's in the package.

Even with all the added ingredients included, the nutrition information for a cake mix still will differ from the cake as consumed if, like Mr. Tidbit and everyone he regards as civilized, you frost the cake.