Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Animal Crackers

Bought a small bag of animal crackers to top off lunch. Quick glance at nutritional info showed me something quite interesting:

Serving size: 16 pieces
Servings in package: 2

Pretty straight forward, right? Read on.

____________16 Pieces_____Whole Package
Calories __________130____________ 250
Calories from fat_____ 20_____________ 35

Now, for those of you whose math is about as bad as mine, 130 + 130 does not 250 equal.

Which leads me to wonder some things. Mainly, should I eat half the package or the entire package. If I eat half the package now and half later, I will consume a total of 260 calories. If I eat the whole thing now, it will only be 250.

But what happens if I eat less than half a package, say, one fourth of the package. Will my overall calorie consumption increase exponentially with smaller and smaller servings? Is there a danger that I could wind up consuming 300 calories if I take a week to eat the entire package, as opposed to the 250 calories I would consume if I just ate the whole thing now? Now that I have opened the bag and started munching, am I committed to the whole thing just to avoid those 50 additional calories (to say nothing of my total fat intake). Should there have been a warning label on the bag--something akin to "you can't eat just one"?

Moral of the story: NEVER look at nutritional information.

3 Comments:

At 12:53 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think I've seen nutritional information where, say, half the container/product/etc was a serving, and combining the individual servings' calories amounted to less than the "entire thing" aggregate calorie count.
I decided to chalk it up to the company pulling a random small percentage outta their rear ends and saying that much caloric content is wasted/not eaten in the process of dividing the content. (I think it was on a frozen pizza or something.)
I do like your continue-halving-for-fewer-calories logic, though. ;)

 
At 7:47 AM, Blogger Ovonia Red said...

Actually, it's continue halving for more calories. I eventually put the bag away... it is in my cabinet at work (along with four boxes of tea--I've been on a tea buying binge lately)... I'm afraid to get it out again.

 
At 7:53 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm gonna go ahead and claim that I wasn't fully awake and that sometimes I do have better logic and thought processing skills than that. :)

--Anna

 

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