A woman wants to sit down Frito-Lay’s CEO for questioning after catching the company allegedly bamboozling customers. In a viral TikTok, Juules (@tacomuncherbeanburruto) reveals how her bag of Doritos chips is tricking folks with its nutritional info. She reveals her experiment in a TikTok, which earned more than 659,000 views as of Wednesday.
In the clip, Juules shows the back of a party-size Doritos bag that holds about 30 servings of chips. She shows the nutritional facts to her viewers, pointing out that one serving (about 11 chips) is 28 grams. The bag states that there are 150 calories per serving.
Juules then pans her camera to a food scale on the counter. On top of it sits a paper plate with 6 chips. The weight reads 28 grams.
“Six chips is 150 calories!” she says. “That is not 11 chips. What the [expletive].”
Viewers think it’s a user issue
Several of Juules’ viewers placed the blame on her, accusing her of not properly weighing the chips.
“Did you zero out your scale with the plate on it?” a top comment with 7,000 likes read. Another user insulted her before alleging that the extra weight is due to the plate. “Tell me you didn’t zero the scale without telling me you didn’t zero out the scale,” a third one wrote.
All of these comments led Juules to make a follow-up video showing how she most definitely tared the scale before weighing the chips. To tare means to adjust the scale to account for the container’s weight.
In the clip, Juules shows how she adds the plate, which weighs about 15 grams, to the scale. Then she presses the tare button and the weight is back to zero. One by one, Juules adds the chips until it reads 29 grams. The total number of chips? Five and a half.
She then measures the chips again without the plate–it’s still 28 grams.
How are serving sizes regulated?
The Food and Drug Administration updated its Nutrition Facts Label in 2016 to reflect new information for diets and diseases. In one of its updates, the FDA stated that “by law, serving sizes must be based on amounts of foods and beverages that people are actually eating, not what they should be eating.”
It claims consumers eat more than before, hence the change. What’s more alarming for consumers, though, is learning that the FDA allows a 20% margin of error in nutritional labels when listing calories, sugars, saturated fats, and cholesterol.
In other words, it’s legal for the nutritional label to print that a serving size has 20% fewer calories than it actually has. A user who found this out posted it on the r/TodayILearned subreddit in 2020. It led to outrage and surprise, as expected, but some users who claimed to work in the food industry added their input.
“Food production and packaging, whether by hand or machine, is not an exact science,” a top comment read. “There’s no way your bag of potato chips has exactly X number of servings or calories per bag.
“If they didn’t provide some flexibility, some dip[expletive] would sue every food manufacturer for being a few percent over or under,” they continued. “20% seems like a lot, but it’s not.”
It’s also worth noting that with this margin of error, foods can also contain 20% fewer calories than printed on the label.
@tacomuncherbeanburruto Valid crashout #pedropascal #fypシ ♬ original sound – juules
Should you be concerned about nutritional labels?
Others, however, were concerned about the significant effect it can have on their dietary lifestyle. For instance, if you’re trying to hit weight loss goals or you’re watching your caloric intake for health reasons, you may be worried about consuming more than you thought. Just as Juules was upset at finding out that a mere 6 chips were around 150 calories, others trying to lose weight may be devastated at learning this. A Business Insider article from 2021, however, quelled those anxieties. According to the article, experts state that “an occasional 20 calories beyond what the label says is a tiny fraction of your total energy intake.”
A VeryWellFit article echoed this sentiment, stating, “Overall, however, study authors noted that the variations were statistically insignificant and there were positive and negative variations in all brands tested. That is, no brand was better than the others in providing accurate numbers.”
The experts in both articles advised the same thing: take nutritional info with a grain of salt and consume in moderation. Balance meals with healthy foods, such as fruits and vegetables, and you should be good to go.
The Mary Sue reached out to Frito-Lay via website contact form and to Juules via TikTok message and comment.
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