Serving sizes...be watchful!

I got this from Hungry Girl (which is well worth subscribing too.  They send a daily article to your email, very informative).  I thought I'd post this one, b/c its worth thinking about, not only for cereal, but for other foods.  I have a food scale and use it often.  You'd be surprised what serving sizes really are!  Inaccurate serving size estimations can lead to unwanted calorie consumption.

This concerns cereal and serving sizes:

"Dear Hungry Girl,

I eat Special K Red Berries cereal for breakfast every morning. The box says it contains about eleven servings, but there is no way it contains eleven cups of cereal (the serving size is one cup). I know because I always measure my cereal with a measuring cup. Why does it say it contains so many servings?

Red Berries Alert


Dear Red Berries Alert,

Excellent question. And one that got me VERY curious. So I went to the store to pick up a box and do some examining, and here's what I found. For starters, my box of Special K Red Berries contained 360g of cereal, not 340g like the box said. That's really not much of a difference at all, but I thought I'd mention it. Then I did some SERIOUS weighing and measuring, and the results weren't pretty. First of all, each serving is supposed to weigh 31 grams and measure out at one cup. I measured a cup of cereal and it weighed 46g -- far from 31. In fact, 31 grams of that Special K Red Berries cereal measured out to be about two-thirds of a cup. So my box of cereal contained closer to eight 1-cup servings, or eleven 2/3-cup servings. Since I was REALLY curious, I decided to break out every single box of cereal at the HG HQ for some further investigation. While many had accurate stats, the cereals with many components (like flakes, fruit, and clusters) typically measured out to smaller serving sizes than the labels said. So what's happening here? Well, it's possible that the flakes break into smaller pieces when the boxes are shipped, making a cup of the cereal more compact. So by the time a box gets to you, the weighed serving size could be smaller than the original measured amount. Also, when a cereal has pieces in it with different sizes and weights (like light flakes mixed with heavy granola clusters), you could be getting more of the heavier items in your bowl, which would throw off the weight and measurement. But let this be a lesson to all of us... if you are super-careful about counting calories, carbs, POINTS®, etc., use a food scale. You don't need a fancy one -- just one that measures both ounces and grams (click here for one I like a lot). Then weigh out the given serving size (31g for that Red Berries cereal), and you'll have yourself one true serving. In my case, if I decided to eat a full cup of that cereal (46g), I'd be eating about 163 calories instead of 110. So when it comes to cereals, snack mixes, etc., weigh AND measure them for a true serving size. Good luck... and happy chewing!!!"