Quote Originally Posted by tomandtish View Post
It gets even tougher when you realize most serving size info doesn't max what people actually eat. A can of coke used to be 1.5 servings. Even now, if its a bottle then 8oz is a serving. Cereal/Granola serving size is 1/2 to 1 cup.

This is not how most people eat these.
This is very true -- portions and serving sizes are really confusing and unintuitive. I'd argue the more processed your food gets, the more important it is to pay attention to serving sizes. Which feeds back into my point about processed/unprocessed food.1 For most people it's almost physically impossible to eat an actually unhealthy amount of fruits or vegetables. They've got so much fiber and water that you get full quickly. But I can eat an entire basket of tortilla chips and never think about the fact that I'm consuming 10+ entire tortillas. The calories you're eating are much less obvious.

That goes double for candy and soda and similar treats, but I feel like everybody gets that sweets are supposed to be a treat. But many people think bread is not only healthy, but necessary.

One example from my own experience: only in the last year or so did I realize that the majority of calories in chips and salsa is from the chips. I wouldn't have thought this just because the way they're both presented, and the salsa is packed with the majority of the flavor IMO. But the salsa is just vegetables and spices, and the chips are -- go figure -- processed grains

1. By which I don't just mean "added sugars, salt, and preservatives" which is its own can of worms but I think gets too much of the "insidious eeeeeeeevil chemicals" attention. I just mean that when you convert a plant into flour, you condense it and sort of "hide" its calories.