Percent Daily Value, A Fool Errant
January 29th, 2006 :: noodleson
With good intention, the Percent Daily Value (%DV) label gives us the big picture on what we’re eating. However, it’s also the same mean by which fancy product marketing fools us.
Using it to compare food with is a fool errant…
Despite its usefullness, the %DV is not good for comparing between two different kinds of food. The reason is that it’s baseless.
Like, what does it means to be a single serving. If you don’t know, that is the correct answer. You can say anything is a single serving and that is why the Daily Value is baseless. Yet, many so-called experts pass on the misconception that you can tell whether something is good on the basis of its Daily Values.
You can try by the weight, but what if it’s mostly water? Not fair to compare with solid food is it? For example, a cup of 1% low fat milk has 4% DV of fat because of water, but it has 22% of calories from fat!
Now you can get a sense of how DV’s in nutrition label deceive, simply by reducing portion sizes by adding water or really…air, if you get the idea!!!
If we want to use the most important thing about food as the basis for comparison, it would have to be the calories. It’s the primary reason for eating, not nutritions. Nutritions play a very minor role because you really need so little of it and only once in a while, unlike what those slick commercials would have us believe - like if adding vitamins to any junk foods would suddenly make it “healthier” than other foods.
Using calories as the base, we can compute the percent of anything from calories by dividing its per serving value or Daily Value by the total calories on the nutrition label. For example, compute the percent fat from calories by dividing its calories by total calories per serving times 100.
The percent “anything” per calories is a far more useful number than the Percent Daily Value because it make more sense for comparison with other foods because it puts into perspective the daily needs for calories first, which is what dieting is all about.
With good intention, the Percent Daily Value (%DV) label gives us the big picture on what we’re eating. However, it’s also the same mean by which fancy product marketing fools us.
Using it to compare food with is a fool errant…
Despite its usefullness, the %DV is not good for comparing between two different kinds of food. The reason is that it’s baseless.
Like, what does it means to be a single serving. If you don’t know, that is the correct answer. You can say anything is a single serving and that is why the Daily Value is baseless. Yet, many so-called experts pass on the misconception that you can tell whether something is good on the basis of its Daily Values.
You can try by the weight, but what if it’s mostly water? Not fair to compare with solid food is it? For example, a cup of 1% low fat milk has 4% DV of fat because of water, but it has 22% of calories from fat!
Now you can get a sense of how DV’s in nutrition label deceive, simply by reducing portion sizes by adding water or really…air, if you get the idea!!!
If we want to use the most important thing about food as the basis for comparison, it would have to be the calories. It’s the primary reason for eating, not nutritions. Nutritions play a very minor role because you really need so little of it and only once in a while, unlike what those slick commercials would have us believe - like if adding vitamins to any junk foods would suddenly make it “healthier” than other foods.
Using calories as the base, we can compute the percent of anything from calories by dividing its per serving value or Daily Value by the total calories on the nutrition label. For example, compute the percent fat from calories by dividing its calories by total calories per serving times 100.
The percent “anything” per calories is a far more useful number than the Percent Daily Value because it make more sense for comparison with other foods because it puts into perspective the daily needs for calories first, which is what dieting is all about.
