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I belive if something is marked as calorie free, fat free, what have you, that it has to be calorie free. Its false advertising and a law suite if its not.
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Unfortunately not:
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Originally Posted by United States Code of Federal Regulations 21CFR101.60 (b)(1) The terms ``calorie free,'' ``free of calories,'' ``no calories,'' ``zero calories,'' ``without calories,'' ``trivial source of calories,'' ``negligible source of calories,'' or ``dietarily insignificant source of calories'' may be used on the label or in the labeling of foods, provided that: (i) The food contains less than 5 calories per reference amount customarily consumed and per labeled serving. |
Now that doesn't mean that 0
calories never means 0
calories -- it only means that it sometimes doesn't mean that. In the case of Crystal Light, I don't drink it anymore. When I did, I believe it ran about 4
calories per glass, so there you can see that it would "qualify" as zero
calories, but a couple of liters would still add up to some significant number of
calories.
My cousin is Director of
Nutrition at the Pritiken Center. His favorite example of the exploitation of the law is Pam cooking spray. They say it has no
calories, but in reality there are over 800
calories per can. The "reference amount" is listed as 1/3 of a second. My cousin, in his lectures around the country, makes a big deal about how he's a professional, and has had lots of practice necessary to learn how to dispense only that 1/3 of a second. Of course, no one actually ever uses that little.
Some things, however, are indeed 0
calories. Vinegar is often labeled "a zero calorie food" (they actually have to say it like that, rather than just claiming zero
calories, whenever the type of food naturally has zero
calories).
Artificial sweeteners vary. Saccharine (Sweet & Low) and sucralose (Spenda) have no
calories. Aspartame (Nutrasweet) itself has 4
calories per gram, but most of what you get in a package of Equal is filler, so it adds up to about 0.014
calories per packet.
