30 Seconds SummaryNutrition Labels Are Inaccurate. And that Doesn’t Matter.
- Nutrition labels can legally vary by up to 20% from the actual nutritional content, which can lead to inaccuracies.
- The article argues that despite these inaccuracies, counting calories remains a useful tool for managing energy intake over longer periods.
- Simulations show that while individual food items can have a high variance from stated to actual calories, over time and across multiple food items, this variance averages out.
- Even when estimating errors within a single day's food consumption, the total caloric intake is usually within 3-5% of the actual figure.
- Over a month, the daily and per-food inaccuracies tend to cancel each other out, maintaining the utility of calorie tracking.
- If foods consistently skew calorie counts in one direction, while it impacts accuracy, the precision remains high, making long-term dietary adjustments viable.
- In most realistic scenarios, even with cumulative small errors, tracking calories is effective for managing diets due to the error balancing out across meals and over time.
Stronger By Science
Greg Nuckols
