The vagueness goes both ways, is what I'm saying.

That’s one reason I would support the “teaspoon “ measure, at least here in the US. Most people can visualize a “teaspoon” in their heads. But I hope it would not be at the expense of eliminating grams! Grams are a much more precise measure, so ideally both should be listed.

Food companies play all sorts of shenanigans with the precision of grams. I saw on facebook yesterday somebody asking if almonds were zero net carbs. The serving size was 7 grams, just perfect for rounding fiber up to 1 gram and carbohydrate down to 1 gram.

That's just 1/4 of an ounce of almonds, or about 5-6 almonds. The standard serving of almonds is an ounce - approximately 22-24 almonds. Yeah, they're definitely playing with the serving size - I thought the nutrition facts were supposed to be changed to reflect realistic serving sizes (what most people actually eat), not some ideal standard serving size.

I have a feeling that rounding up the fiber and rounding down the carbs was only a bonus of changing the serving size though - such a small serving size dramatically affects the fat content of a serving, which we know these days is far more important (to most people) than the carb content. A standard 1 ounce serving of almonds contains a shockingly high 14.9 g of fat, nearly 1/4 of your daily 65 g fat allowance!) So reduce the serving size enough, and magically, almonds fit quite nicely into your hearthealthylowfatlowcaloriediet.

Yes, I think both grams and teaspoons should be listed.

There's only one problem with that.

A great many people already ignore the nutrition label information - they just don't want to bother reading it, especially when it's not in the standard rectangle format with sections for each macro, and a line for each aspect of that macro. When the nutrition info is in tiny lettering that looks like run-on prose, along with the ingredients (standard way of fitting it all in on lots of individually sold granola bars), few people bother to read through that as it is. Add in still more about how many teaspoons that the 12 g of added sugars is actually 3 teaspoons of added sugars, and even fewer people will bother to read it.

Granted, they could eliminate a good chunk of the excess reading by eliminating the stuff about sat fat and cholesterol - but we know they're not going to do that any time soon.

The teaspoon figure would go on the front of packaging oon its own, it wouldn't be part of the nutrition label itself. This way it would be harder to miss.

We already have another front-of-package system in Australia and New Zealand called the Healthy Star Rating system, where foods are graded on their overall health from 1 to 5 stars. The problem with that system is that the ratings are determined by guidelines, so cereals loaded with grains typically get up to 4 stars while cream gets 1 star because of the saturated fat.

So for us the idea of putting teaspoons on the front is particularly good, as it would replace something that's already there and considerably worse.

That’s why I like the standard 100-gram measure they use in Europe. Not so easy to game the system!

Some stores here (including where I work) use a rating system called "Guiding Stars". Food and grocery products are rated 1-3 stars, according to the typical healthy guidelines, and the rating appears on the shelf tag, not the packaging itself. Not everything is rated though, since the ratings only cover "good" (1 star), "better" (2 stars), and "best" (3 stars). Other reasons there might not be a rating is that the product is too new to have received a rating yet, has no calories (such as bottled water), baby formula, or anything with a medicinal value.

A while back, they offered a small discount to employees (we rarely get any kind of discount at all) on anything we bought that had received guiding stars. I saw the discount when co-workers bought granola bars, lower sugar cereals, whole grain breads, veggies and fruits, low fat dairy, etc - no surprise there at all.

But one day during the time we had our little discount, I did a little shopping, and was quite shocked to see on my receipt that there was a guiding star discount for the container of chicken livers, and also the whole pork loin I bought that day. I have no idea how many stars either one received, because there were no shelf tags for either. (The ratings still applied, even if we don't yet have the shelf tags designating that something was a guiding stars item) I knew that chicken livers were a nutritional powerhouse, but figured that the fat content alone would give them enough demerits to negate any nutritional value, and prevent them from even earning one star, so that was quite a surprise. The whole pork loin was almost as much of a surprise, because a whole pork loin generally has a layer of fat along the top of it. They trim it pretty close, but still - fat content!!!!

Oh yeah, count our your seven almonds... wait a minute... count out seven more...