"Only 9 grams of fat"

What a useless statement.   What matters is the ratio of the nutrients, not the absolute quantities, because the serving size can always be adjusted.   I frequently see product packaging bragging about low fat content or low caloric content even though fat and refined sugar constitute 100% of the nutritional content of the product.  The fact that something contains little or no nutriment does NOT make it healthy, contrary to the ideas that all this marketing seems to promote.   The marketers can dilute the product with air or water and downsize the labeled serving size to whatever they want to meet whatever caloric claim they want to make.


You should get about 50% of your calories from carbs, 30% from protein, and 20% from fat.   Since fat has 9 calories per gram and protein has 4, that implies that you should get about 3.5 grams of protein for every gram of fat you consume.    The difficult thing about that is to get enough protein without getting too much fat.


Baked chicken breasts only contain about 2.5 grams of protein per gram of fat.  Almost all beef contains more fat than protein.

However, grain, soy, skim milk, and tuna can compensate for that.  All four have protein:fat ratios in excess of 10:1.   Also, salmon is good at around 5:1.   Salmon contains some useful kinds of fats that are not found in significant quantities in land-based meat (such as ALA).   ALA is used in the brain as a component of myelin.


So I would like to see products advertising their protein:fat:carbohydrate ratio and their nutrient content instead of useless statements like "only 100 calories" that are solely determined by the marketer's arbitrarily small choice of a serving size.

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