Nutrition Labels - Per Serving?? Confused...

The back of the nutrition labels are usually per serving... how much a regular person would eat at once -- correct me if I'm wrong.

Does anyone find these amounts ridiculously small though??

For example for lunch we are having a 1kg lasagna frozen meal... and the per serving is 1/4 package... there is definitely NOT enough for four people's lunches in there!

But is that how much we are supposed to be eat for a meal?? If not, what are we supposed to go by and whats the point in per serving labels than!

yes.  that's the serving size based on a 2000 cal/day diet.  but remember, that's not supposed to be your whole meal.  put the lasagne on your plate, then fill the rest with veggies and salad. 

edited to add that this is why i cook.  serving sizes on prepared foods are small because fat, sodium, and calorie contents are so high.  if they tell you that a serving has 600 calories, 2000mgs of sodium, and 35g of fat, you probably won't buy the lasagne, right?

If you do decide to make it your whole meal though, eat the amount that sounds right for the calorie amount that you need.... i.e. I like to have cereal for breakfast, but 1 cup of cheerios only has 110 calories, and will certainly not last me until lunch time.  Therefore, for my own breakfast, 2 cups of cheerios, or two servings, seems fine to me :-) (although, sometimes I add fruit on top of that)

Its more balanced if you don't just eat that one prepared food, but sometimes that's the only option...

 

This is like my biggest annoyance! I hate it when its a really small tin eg, soup or tuna or whatever and they tell you 1/2 or 1/4 is a serving, NO ONE would ever eat that! So annoying! And cereal is one of mine as well, especially because some brands put the cal. count with milk on the front and others do it with milk. Or when they tell you by grams.. why not just say half a packet? or when they say just per 100 grams and not per packet! Working out how many grams your likely to eat, all stuff like that, goodness its annoying!

Sorry, went off on one... Ha ha ha, but I feel your pain totally :)

xxxx

i eat half a can of tuna/salmon all the time.  i couldn't believe it when i had a roommate briefly last summer and she regularly put a whole can of salmon (mine) in her salad.

some of the serving sizes are perfectly reasonable; the problem is mostly with prepared foods that are so high in calories that they make the serving sizes tiny to try to fool uninformed label-readers. 

the other problem, of course, is the american diet.  lots of people are used to eating a day's worth of food--or more--in a single meal.  i think the key is to eat slowly and enjoy the flavour of food rather than going for that full feeling (i HATE that full feeling).

I am in agreement with pgeorgian on how the american diet has changed.  If you look back in history, prior to prepackaged foods when people pretty much farmed or didn't have the capability to preserve foods like we do now, the health problems we have now didn't exist to the level it does today.  Eating large meals or eat what you want is all around us so we want large meals, but our lives are very sedentary compared to those years ago.  And they ate better meals than we did that didn't have all of the "stuff" that foods have today.  Cooking in lard wasn't a problem because they physically worked it off.

This may sound far fetched but its true.  I was frustrated and began researching foods when I found out that I had diabetes and didn't understand why when others in my family didn't.  I've found that sticking to recommended portion sizes and adding vegetables and fruits (organic when possible) to the meal keep me on track.  It also adds fiber and foods with great health benefits.  Also my tastes have changed too.  On occasion I crave the "bad" stuff, but now I can order a small french fry and eat a few, not the whole thing.

SOME of the serving sizes on commercial food are realistic (1 cup pasta, etc.) but a lot of them are rigged to make the nutrition stats look the way they want them to. Nobody's going to buy a can of soup if it says that one serving contains 12% of your RDI for sodium, but if it says 3 servings in the can at 40% each people won't blink. It's like all the packets that say 'reduced sodium' (1% less than previously is 'reduced' but still far too much) or '25% less than our regular product', and if you look at them carefully they're still LOADED with it and some other brand's 'regular' actually has less. And the same for fat and calories... they want to make it look as good as possible to the casual glance. 

They also assume that the product will NOT be your entire meal - that you'll eat your piece of lasagna and a salad or a vegetable... and if you do then veggies are a good way to make the meal healthier and more filling (and lower calorie!).  

It's not a suggestion of how much a person will eat, it's just what they based the nutritional information on.  I hate it when they lable something for teensy servings.  And it's tricky when you get a bottle of juice at what you think is 110 calories, and it turns out that there are 2 servings in that bottle.  Don't most people drink the whole thing?

And really be careful when it says "fat free" or "sugar free"!  I recently noticed that the sugar free version of my favorite chocolate has more calories than the regular kind.

Read before you buy, and watch out!  I don't have that problem often because I cook almost everything from scratch.  I know what and how much goes into what!

what about  speghetti noodles it says 2 oz, but how muich is that and is it cooked or not?!!!