I think even worse than this is the disconnect between a product name and the actual composition of the product.
Its most rampant with juices, where every juice is actually just apple juice (from concentrate, so mostly water anyway) with a splash of [fruit] juice thrown in (also from concentrate, so also mostly water). Maybe if you are lucky you'll catch an apple shown on the front label behind the huge passion fruit or whatever.
This even extends to clothing, where stuff like "Wool Sweater" is 5% wool 15% cotton and 80% polyester.
It should be a law that the primary ingredient of a product being the leading noun in the name of the product.
But lots of things are mostly water. Fresh fruit juice, wine, meat, humans. They're just not made by adding water. Beer is though. I don't think it should be labelled "water".
"From concentrate" pretty much means all the water was taken out, and then they decided how much to put back in. It also allows them to make incredibly sugary drinks while also advertising "No added sugar".
I suppose to be fair, whole pressed juices are incredibly expensive. But I think they should be forced to be more upfront about what these "juices" actually are - mostly apple juice powder with a few other fruit powders sprinkled in and then mixed with water to the desired sweetness level.
The wool thing is mysterious, because I keep hearing about sheep farmers losing money on shearing sheep because the raw wool price is too low, and then I went round a fabric shop the other day and it was all polyester, I don't get why.
Simply adopting reasonable labeling rules proven in other countries would fix a lot of problems in general. Japan has a great system for beverages. It wouldn't hurt if we adopted their safety standards around eggs either. https://xn--btro1dr1yrpow7m.com/en/what-are-the-rules-for-ju...
This is a dumb thing that HN does, certain words get stripped from titles. You can edit them back in but submitters either don't know that or just don't bother.
It's not a scam. And added sugars are listed prominently in the nutrition facts.
It's the fact that different sugars have different properties. In terms of texture, moisture, etc. And they can be used at different stages of the manufacturing process.
There's nothing wrong with this. Nutrition facts clearly label the total added sugars.
Plus, strawberries are often going to be listed first anyways because traditional jam is approximately a 1:1 ratio of fruit to sugar. So even if it were just one type of sugar, strawberries could still be listed first.
You're defending the example (why idk), but what about, say, a dog food company listing "buffalo meat" as its #1 ingredient by simply splitting every filler ingredient into constituent parts?
How does one reward the "good guys" when one can't tell the difference between a gamed metric and an honest one?
Why? Because I once researched it also assuming it was a scam, and then found out it very much wasn't.
I can't speak to dog food, I haven't researched that -- just the multiple sugar types. And also that when ice cream lists skim milk as an ingredient along with heavy cream, this isn't to make it appear healthier either -- it's to control the overall milkfat levels.
But if you're looking for nutritional information, that's literally on the label next to the ingredients. If you want to judge the protein or the sugar, then just look at that. If you're trying to judge those amounts by looking at the order of ingredients, that's your mistake to begin with.
I have thought about this hack before while looking at ingredient lists. I don't know what the best wording would be to establish the spirit of the law, but obviously this should be banned.
> You must mention the quantity (by percentage) of any ingredients that: appear in the name of the product (example: ‘apple pie')
[; or] are emphasised on the labelling in words, pictures or graphics (example: ‘with walnuts')[; or] are essential to characterise the food and to distinguish it from other foods[.]
The solution is to require % by mass number next to each ingredient. This way even if strawberry is first ingredient, the low percentage will make the scam obvious.
The same argument could be used against disclosing ingredients altogether.
I'd rather know what I'm eating and not have greedy CEOs pinching their pennies of profit like they're guarding the Krabby Patty formula, because they're scared someone else will learn the generational secret of how to make (checks notes) strawberry jelly. Trust me, the economy will survive if Smuckers tells you how much sugar you're eating.
That solution is already in place for sugar. The jam that is the focus of the tweet is 60% sugar, and this is prominently printed on the label. What problem do you think you're trying to solve?
The product could still be 60% sugar and contain 0% strawberries. It could be still be 60% sugar and contain 1% strawberries.
Sugar content doesn't tell you anything about berry content. It's not unreasonable for someone to want look at the list of ingredients and know if what they are buying is mostly fruit or mostly HFCS. Or even just mostly sugars that didn't come from the berries.
The only problem here is that no part of your comment is true.
The strawberries are listed first, before any sugar component. That means they have to be more than 15% of the product.
In fact, the only other ingredients are fruit pectin (the gelling agent) and citric acid (flavor), both of which must be present at very low levels.¹
Strawberries are the entire rest of the ingredients list. And they're also 25% of the sugar content, which is 12g of sugar per serving of which 9g is "added sugar". There's nothing even slightly misleading about this.
The recommendation for strawberry jam is 4 tsp of dry pectin per 4 cups of added sugar. There are 3 tsp in one tablespoon and 16 tablespoons in one cup, for a pectin-to-added-sugar ratio of 1:48. This suggests the jam is under 1% pectin, and the citric acid is even less.
> The strawberries are listed first, before any sugar component. That means they have to be more than 15% of the product.
The point of this "article" is that they can break up the sugar ingredients so that it's possible for no single source of sugar to be more than the amount of strawberries, but to still have more sugars than strawberries and yet put strawberries first. I'm not saying that this particular jelly example does that, only that the rules would allow for it.
How is this a 'hack'? It's listing ingredients in order of quantity. The nutrition facts already tell you total amount of sugar per serving separately, that's not what the ingredient list is for to begin with. Also, I don't have much sympathy for someone surprised that jelly contains a lot of sugar:
A) Have you tasted it
B) Do you have any idea what jelly is or why it exists
C) Have you ever made it?
Jelly inherently, as a direct consequence of its very reason for existing, contains a lot of sugar, duh.
> Jelly inherently, as a direct consequence of its very reason for existing, contains a lot of sugar, duh.
If a typical jelly recipe calls for pounds of fruit and a few cups of sugar wouldn't be normal to expect fruit to be the first ingredient? If a company is using more added sugars than fruit that should be obvious without having to look at the nutrition facts
Typical jelly & jamrecipes call for close to 1:1 fruit to sugar. E.g. ¹Ball mason jars strawberry jam recipe calls for 7 cups sugar to 5 cups strawberries. Martha Stewart calls for 3/4 cup sugar for every cup of juice² in making jelly. The Joy of Cooking (44th printing 1988)notes that "Store-bought jellies, according to law, must have at least 45% fruit and 55% sugar". Etc.
For the product in question, they aren't using more added sugars than fruit.
As you can read on the label:
Ingredients: Strawberries, High Fructose Corn syrup, Corn syrup, Sugar, Fruit Pectin, Citric Acid.
Serving Size 20g
Total Sugars 12g
Total Added Sugars 9g
Each tablespoon of jam contains 10-11 grams of fruit and 9-10 grams of added sugar. The jam is 60% sugar overall because there is sugar in the fruit too.
And that's weighted by share of the output. If you're measuring the input, this recipe is going to take a lot more "fruit" than "sugar", because part of making jam is boiling away a bunch of the water that occurs in fruit, whereas all of the added sugar is retained. (Corn syrup, however, seems to be about 2/3 water, which will make that comparison look worse.)
The hack is to use several different ingredients of the same type where they would have used just one, and doing it just so they can have the ingredient they want listed first as first.
Deception is bad, but from a nutritional point of view this really shouldn't be an issue for informed consumers (ie. people who read the ingredient lists) given that "nutrition facts" also exists. 10g of sugar is 10g of sugar, regardless if it came from a strawberry, fruit juices, or HFCS. This is especially true in highly processed foods, where the processing eliminates any advantage that "natural" sugars have.
> 10g of sugar is 10g of sugar, regardless if it came from a strawberry, fruit juices, or HFCS.
From a biological pov, that is wrong on so many levels. It is why labels now have Added Sugars listed separately. Sugars as whole fruit aren't unhealthy in moderation, whereas HFCS is one if the unhealthiest added sugars. There is no way to equate them except in pure chemistry with no relation to biology.
>Sugars as whole fruit aren't unhealthy in moderation
That's why I specifically mentioned the processing part. Sugar in apple might not be comparable to sugar in a coke, but all of that goes out the window when you're comparing the sugar content of jellies.
>whereas HFCS is one if the unhealthiest added sugars. There is no way to equate them except in pure chemistry with no relation to biology.
You're free to gamble with your own life if you like, but don't expect to take others down with your dangerous beliefs and ignorance of basic fructose biology.
Is it really a scam though? They still have to list all of the sweeteners. Not all sweeteners work the same too. And... not limited to American companies...
Given how often HN trends to the frontpage “rage for views” posts that link to GitHub issues where the submitter dislikes the current outcome, this three-word argument against the post is uniquely unpersuasive here. This US foods practice is a worthwhile topic to rage about given the severity of public health impact of the mislabeling alone, and it’s an easily-solved problem when regulators aren’t captured.
@WallStreetApes is not a reliable source on literally any topic in the world (maybe besides how to make money by being a right-wing Twitter content farm). This being on the front page is a discredit to HN.
There's a city-level law in Santa Cruz (California) that levies a punitive tax on beverages that contain added sugar. It's weird in a couple of ways.
"All-natural juice" is exempt, and it's defined by whether the sugar is "added". So if you combine 20 gallons of orange juice and evaporate the water away until it's reached the concentration of sugar you want, that's fine; if you get one gallon of juice and add sugar until you've reached the same concentration, you're subject to the tax. Oranges contain enough sugar that this is viable for orange juice. Limes don't, so limeade is taxed very heavily while orange juice that contains the same amount of sugar is exempt.
Milk products (dairy or imitation) are exempt, and they are legally defined by the first ingredient (for milk) or first two ingredients (for imitation milk). Chocolate milk isn't a sugar-added beverage, because it's a milk product. Eggnog is a milk product too.
This second point seems to explain why it's important for companies to manipulate which ingredients are listed first.
There's really no chance of misleading the consumer, because right above the legally-mandated and legally sensitive ingredients list you'll see the legally mandated and not legally sensitive nutrition facts, which will tell you that eggnog is about 17% sugar by weight or that, to use the example here, Smucker's strawberry jam is 60% sugar. ( https://www.smuckers.com/fruit-spreads/jam/strawberry-jam )
In this case it was the submitted title but I think we can fix it by shortening further.
(Submitted title was "scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient gets listed 1st". Software rewrote it to "Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient gets listed first". I've since changed it.)
I guess if you just look at the first ingredient but its both obvious there are multiple sources of sugar/simple carbs and that jam is typically very heavily sweetened; this is how it has a long shelf life.
Jam is a pretty sweet product, but that doesn't mean I'd expect I'd expect more sweeteners than fruit. A basic recipe for strawberry jam might require a couple pounds of strawberries and a couple cups of sugar. That'd still have a shelf life of a year or more (unopened).
But sugar is literally added to jelly as the preservative, that's why jelly exists to begin with.
For example, the very first recipe for strawberry jelly from some horrible spam recipe site:
2 cups (16 ounces) pure strawberry juice (I used 3 1/2 pounds ripe, fresh strawberries to get this amount of juice)
3 1/3 cups (666 grams) granulated sugar
I think even worse than this is the disconnect between a product name and the actual composition of the product.
Its most rampant with juices, where every juice is actually just apple juice (from concentrate, so mostly water anyway) with a splash of [fruit] juice thrown in (also from concentrate, so also mostly water). Maybe if you are lucky you'll catch an apple shown on the front label behind the huge passion fruit or whatever.
This even extends to clothing, where stuff like "Wool Sweater" is 5% wool 15% cotton and 80% polyester.
It should be a law that the primary ingredient of a product being the leading noun in the name of the product.
But lots of things are mostly water. Fresh fruit juice, wine, meat, humans. They're just not made by adding water. Beer is though. I don't think it should be labelled "water".
"From concentrate" pretty much means all the water was taken out, and then they decided how much to put back in. It also allows them to make incredibly sugary drinks while also advertising "No added sugar".
I suppose to be fair, whole pressed juices are incredibly expensive. But I think they should be forced to be more upfront about what these "juices" actually are - mostly apple juice powder with a few other fruit powders sprinkled in and then mixed with water to the desired sweetness level.
The wool thing is mysterious, because I keep hearing about sheep farmers losing money on shearing sheep because the raw wool price is too low, and then I went round a fabric shop the other day and it was all polyester, I don't get why.
I remember looking at a carton of Whole Foods soy milk that prominently said “no added sugar”.
I looked on the back and after water the second ingredient was “dehydrated cane juice”.
The food system has been gamed forever.
Simply adopting reasonable labeling rules proven in other countries would fix a lot of problems in general. Japan has a great system for beverages. It wouldn't hurt if we adopted their safety standards around eggs either. https://xn--btro1dr1yrpow7m.com/en/what-are-the-rules-for-ju...
Prefixing the title with “The” would make it a lot easier to parse.
This is a dumb thing that HN does, certain words get stripped from titles. You can edit them back in but submitters either don't know that or just don't bother.
Had the same thought.
> Scam American companies
... why would I do that?
> Scam American companies are using
... so fake companies?
> Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient lists
... What?
(reads post)
Oh. "Food companies are splitting up ingredients to manipulate you"
(as a tangent: There's zero percent chance this is only "American" companies. Useless addon word.)
So it’s not about scam American companies, who are using drugs(?) to manipulate…?
It's not a scam. And added sugars are listed prominently in the nutrition facts.
It's the fact that different sugars have different properties. In terms of texture, moisture, etc. And they can be used at different stages of the manufacturing process.
There's nothing wrong with this. Nutrition facts clearly label the total added sugars.
Plus, strawberries are often going to be listed first anyways because traditional jam is approximately a 1:1 ratio of fruit to sugar. So even if it were just one type of sugar, strawberries could still be listed first.
You're defending the example (why idk), but what about, say, a dog food company listing "buffalo meat" as its #1 ingredient by simply splitting every filler ingredient into constituent parts?
How does one reward the "good guys" when one can't tell the difference between a gamed metric and an honest one?
Why? Because I once researched it also assuming it was a scam, and then found out it very much wasn't.
I can't speak to dog food, I haven't researched that -- just the multiple sugar types. And also that when ice cream lists skim milk as an ingredient along with heavy cream, this isn't to make it appear healthier either -- it's to control the overall milkfat levels.
But if you're looking for nutritional information, that's literally on the label next to the ingredients. If you want to judge the protein or the sugar, then just look at that. If you're trying to judge those amounts by looking at the order of ingredients, that's your mistake to begin with.
I have thought about this hack before while looking at ingredient lists. I don't know what the best wording would be to establish the spirit of the law, but obviously this should be banned.
Strawberries (11%) would be sufficient:
> You must mention the quantity (by percentage) of any ingredients that: appear in the name of the product (example: ‘apple pie') [; or] are emphasised on the labelling in words, pictures or graphics (example: ‘with walnuts')[; or] are essential to characterise the food and to distinguish it from other foods[.]
— EU food labeling rules, https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/product-rules-complian...
The solution is to require % by mass number next to each ingredient. This way even if strawberry is first ingredient, the low percentage will make the scam obvious.
That's likely untenable for food companies because it means disclosing their recipe.
The same argument could be used against disclosing ingredients altogether.
I'd rather know what I'm eating and not have greedy CEOs pinching their pennies of profit like they're guarding the Krabby Patty formula, because they're scared someone else will learn the generational secret of how to make (checks notes) strawberry jelly. Trust me, the economy will survive if Smuckers tells you how much sugar you're eating.
A company's desire to hide their recipe shouldn't matter over the consumer's desire to know what's in the food they buy and eat.
> it means disclosing their recipe
“Natural flavors.”
I doubt you can’t reverse engineer those fractions from a product and ingredient list anyway.
Well if becomes law, not doing it is even more untenable
That solution is already in place for sugar. The jam that is the focus of the tweet is 60% sugar, and this is prominently printed on the label. What problem do you think you're trying to solve?
The product could still be 60% sugar and contain 0% strawberries. It could be still be 60% sugar and contain 1% strawberries.
Sugar content doesn't tell you anything about berry content. It's not unreasonable for someone to want look at the list of ingredients and know if what they are buying is mostly fruit or mostly HFCS. Or even just mostly sugars that didn't come from the berries.
The only problem here is that no part of your comment is true.
The strawberries are listed first, before any sugar component. That means they have to be more than 15% of the product.
In fact, the only other ingredients are fruit pectin (the gelling agent) and citric acid (flavor), both of which must be present at very low levels.¹
Strawberries are the entire rest of the ingredients list. And they're also 25% of the sugar content, which is 12g of sugar per serving of which 9g is "added sugar". There's nothing even slightly misleading about this.
¹ Here's a make-your-own-jam page with rules of thumb for pectin in jam: https://missvickie.com/jam-pectin-calculator/ .
The recommendation for strawberry jam is 4 tsp of dry pectin per 4 cups of added sugar. There are 3 tsp in one tablespoon and 16 tablespoons in one cup, for a pectin-to-added-sugar ratio of 1:48. This suggests the jam is under 1% pectin, and the citric acid is even less.
> The strawberries are listed first, before any sugar component. That means they have to be more than 15% of the product.
The point of this "article" is that they can break up the sugar ingredients so that it's possible for no single source of sugar to be more than the amount of strawberries, but to still have more sugars than strawberries and yet put strawberries first. I'm not saying that this particular jelly example does that, only that the rules would allow for it.
How is this a 'hack'? It's listing ingredients in order of quantity. The nutrition facts already tell you total amount of sugar per serving separately, that's not what the ingredient list is for to begin with. Also, I don't have much sympathy for someone surprised that jelly contains a lot of sugar: A) Have you tasted it B) Do you have any idea what jelly is or why it exists C) Have you ever made it?
Jelly inherently, as a direct consequence of its very reason for existing, contains a lot of sugar, duh.
> Jelly inherently, as a direct consequence of its very reason for existing, contains a lot of sugar, duh.
If a typical jelly recipe calls for pounds of fruit and a few cups of sugar wouldn't be normal to expect fruit to be the first ingredient? If a company is using more added sugars than fruit that should be obvious without having to look at the nutrition facts
Typical jelly & jamrecipes call for close to 1:1 fruit to sugar. E.g. ¹Ball mason jars strawberry jam recipe calls for 7 cups sugar to 5 cups strawberries. Martha Stewart calls for 3/4 cup sugar for every cup of juice² in making jelly. The Joy of Cooking (44th printing 1988)notes that "Store-bought jellies, according to law, must have at least 45% fruit and 55% sugar". Etc.
¹https://www.ballmasonjars.com/blog?cid=classic-strawberry-ja...
²https://www.marthastewart.com/1127955/basic-jelly-recipe
³ ISBN 0-02-604570-2, Joy of Cooking, Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer & Becker, page 832
For the product in question, they aren't using more added sugars than fruit.
As you can read on the label:
Each tablespoon of jam contains 10-11 grams of fruit and 9-10 grams of added sugar. The jam is 60% sugar overall because there is sugar in the fruit too.And that's weighted by share of the output. If you're measuring the input, this recipe is going to take a lot more "fruit" than "sugar", because part of making jam is boiling away a bunch of the water that occurs in fruit, whereas all of the added sugar is retained. (Corn syrup, however, seems to be about 2/3 water, which will make that comparison look worse.)
The hack is to use several different ingredients of the same type where they would have used just one, and doing it just so they can have the ingredient they want listed first as first.
If it is done with intent to mislead consumers, then it is a hack.
Because the intent is to mislead while staying within the letter of the rules. I don't think it's complicated.
Presumably you could just require % amounts to be specified (and make sure to pick volume vs weight in some fashion that avoids gaming).
Deception is bad, but from a nutritional point of view this really shouldn't be an issue for informed consumers (ie. people who read the ingredient lists) given that "nutrition facts" also exists. 10g of sugar is 10g of sugar, regardless if it came from a strawberry, fruit juices, or HFCS. This is especially true in highly processed foods, where the processing eliminates any advantage that "natural" sugars have.
> 10g of sugar is 10g of sugar, regardless if it came from a strawberry, fruit juices, or HFCS.
From a biological pov, that is wrong on so many levels. It is why labels now have Added Sugars listed separately. Sugars as whole fruit aren't unhealthy in moderation, whereas HFCS is one if the unhealthiest added sugars. There is no way to equate them except in pure chemistry with no relation to biology.
>Sugars as whole fruit aren't unhealthy in moderation
That's why I specifically mentioned the processing part. Sugar in apple might not be comparable to sugar in a coke, but all of that goes out the window when you're comparing the sugar content of jellies.
>whereas HFCS is one if the unhealthiest added sugars. There is no way to equate them except in pure chemistry with no relation to biology.
Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup#Healt...
>As of 2026, there is no scientific consensus or regulatory concern that fructose or HFCS impacts cardiometabolic health when substituted for sucrose
https://medicalxpress.com/search/?search=fructose&h=1&s=0
You're free to gamble with your own life if you like, but don't expect to take others down with your dangerous beliefs and ignorance of basic fructose biology.
Is it really a scam though? They still have to list all of the sweeteners. Not all sweeteners work the same too. And... not limited to American companies...
> I included 10 more popular American foods where this same “ingredients slitting” scam tactic is being used at the end of the video
Rage for views.
> Rage for views.
Given how often HN trends to the frontpage “rage for views” posts that link to GitHub issues where the submitter dislikes the current outcome, this three-word argument against the post is uniquely unpersuasive here. This US foods practice is a worthwhile topic to rage about given the severity of public health impact of the mislabeling alone, and it’s an easily-solved problem when regulators aren’t captured.
The problem isn't the topic; to hear what the real problem is, subscribe to my youtube channel.
How about: just eat whole foods
Focus on the macros first. Ingredients don't tell you much.
@WallStreetApes is not a reliable source on literally any topic in the world (maybe besides how to make money by being a right-wing Twitter content farm). This being on the front page is a discredit to HN.
There's a city-level law in Santa Cruz (California) that levies a punitive tax on beverages that contain added sugar. It's weird in a couple of ways.
"All-natural juice" is exempt, and it's defined by whether the sugar is "added". So if you combine 20 gallons of orange juice and evaporate the water away until it's reached the concentration of sugar you want, that's fine; if you get one gallon of juice and add sugar until you've reached the same concentration, you're subject to the tax. Oranges contain enough sugar that this is viable for orange juice. Limes don't, so limeade is taxed very heavily while orange juice that contains the same amount of sugar is exempt.
Milk products (dairy or imitation) are exempt, and they are legally defined by the first ingredient (for milk) or first two ingredients (for imitation milk). Chocolate milk isn't a sugar-added beverage, because it's a milk product. Eggnog is a milk product too.
This second point seems to explain why it's important for companies to manipulate which ingredients are listed first.
There's really no chance of misleading the consumer, because right above the legally-mandated and legally sensitive ingredients list you'll see the legally mandated and not legally sensitive nutrition facts, which will tell you that eggnog is about 17% sugar by weight or that, to use the example here, Smucker's strawberry jam is 60% sugar. ( https://www.smuckers.com/fruit-spreads/jam/strawberry-jam )
@dang : the title shortener seems to have semantically goofed via syntactically having goofed
In this case it was the submitted title but I think we can fix it by shortening further.
(Submitted title was "scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient gets listed 1st". Software rewrote it to "Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient gets listed first". I've since changed it.)
thanks
I guess if you just look at the first ingredient but its both obvious there are multiple sources of sugar/simple carbs and that jam is typically very heavily sweetened; this is how it has a long shelf life.
Jam is a pretty sweet product, but that doesn't mean I'd expect I'd expect more sweeteners than fruit. A basic recipe for strawberry jam might require a couple pounds of strawberries and a couple cups of sugar. That'd still have a shelf life of a year or more (unopened).
But sugar is literally added to jelly as the preservative, that's why jelly exists to begin with.
For example, the very first recipe for strawberry jelly from some horrible spam recipe site:
2 cups (16 ounces) pure strawberry juice (I used 3 1/2 pounds ripe, fresh strawberries to get this amount of juice) 3 1/3 cups (666 grams) granulated sugar
It's literally more sugar than strawberry juice.
Or maybe you would expect more sweetener. What's wrong with honesty in labeling?