Serving sizes are a joke. Behold this bag of popcorn:
“106 calories per serving,” it proudly proclaims. You quickly do the mental calculation – that’s a mere 5% of your recommended daily allowance! Even better, it’s “wholegrain” and “high in fibre.” You munch on what you consider to be a serving of popcorn, safe in the knowledge that you are surely one of the healthiest and most responsible humans alive.
Some time later, you wonder: exactly how big is a serving? It says it right there on the front, in tiny writing: 20g. But how much is 20g? Is that a lot? It’s a sixth of the bag, which strikes you as being pretty small since you normally have at least a third of a bag at a time. So you weigh it out:
In case it isn’t obvious, 20g of popcorn is not a lot of popcorn. You’d be embarrassed to give that out to kids at Halloween. It is in no way what a normal human would consider to be serving. Of course, neither are most servings.
mssv 