Why it's important
The USDA uses a standard 100-gram portion size for calculating nutrition to ensure consistency and ease of comparison across different foods. Since foods come in varying sizes and serving portions, this universal baseline allows consumers, dietitians, and researchers to accurately compare nutrient content, such as calories, vitamins, and minerals. It simplifies nutrition labeling and helps identify nutrient-dense or low-nutrient foods more effectively. This standardization promotes informed dietary choices and aids in meeting daily nutritional needs.
How to use it
Here are two examples of how to enter data for a nutrition label.
1) A container of salsa with total weight of 429g
* Number of Servings: 13 (You decide how many servings)
* Per: Container (whatever descriptive name suits your needs)
* Serving Size: 2 Tbsp (this is proportional to the number of servings)
* Label serving weight grams: 33 (simple division of 429g/13servings=33g)
While all the fields are significant, the "Number of Servings" field is the most crucial. This field is used to divide the total weight of the container's contents, which is 429g, to calculate the serving size of 33g and to determine the respective nutrition facts per serving.
In the provided image, the left chart displays the nutrients for one serving of 429g, while the right chart presents the nutrients for 13 servings of 33g each. Once again, the "Number of Servings" field is the key factor controlling all the calculations. The other three fields, "Per," "Serving Size," and "Label Serving Weight Grams", require accurate data entry on your part; however, they do not factor into any reciProfity calculations.
2) Two brownies in a bag:
There are 2 brownies per bag. Each brownie is 1 serving, so there are 2 servings per bag. There is also 21g of added sugar.
And this is how it will appear on the label, with added sugars: