Health

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Kettle Chips: When Cutting the Fat Doesn’t Cut the Calories

When a product is air fried, one expects it to have fewer calories. Such doesn’t seem to be the case, however, with Kettle Chips.

Here is the regular variety of Kettle chips. It has 140 calories per ounce and nine grams of fat.

Regular Kettle Chips

Now here is the “air fried” Kettle chips.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Air Fried Kettle Chips

This variety says “air fried” in huge letters, but in small type that some people might miss, it says “kettle cooked, air finished.” What? The chips are really deep-fat fried, but then blown dry, so to speak?

That alone could be misleading, and so the company was just sued in March by a consumer.

But look closer, comparing the two nutrition labels. The air-fried product says 30% less fat than the regular version, and sure enough, it has six grams of fat per ounce versus nine grams of fat. But how is it possible that the bag with less fat has the exact same amount of calories per ounce? The ingredients in both products seem to be in the same order of predominance.

We asked Campbell’s Soup, the maker of Kettle chips, for an explanation. They did not reply.

Now it is your turn. What could explain that there is no change in calories in the air-fried product despite having one-third less fat?

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Presidential Election Campaign Fund Pays for Medical Research Too

A funny thing happened when Ken E. was filing his taxes using H&R Block software. When he got to the screen asking if he would like to give $3 to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund, he clicked the “learn more” link and got an unexpected explanation in the fine print.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Election finance

Say what?

Apparently in 2014, Congress decided to no longer allow political parties to use taxpayer money from the Presidential Election Campaign Fund to finance their party conventions. Instead, it redirected that money to the “10-Year Pediatric Research Initiative Fund” designed to fund projects related to childhood diseases. The law was named after Gabriella Miller, who, while battling a rare form of brain cancer herself, helped raise money to fund pediatric cancer research. She died at age 10.

Our consumer said, “Even in my wildest dreams I would not have connected giving to the campaign fund to mean that I am donating to pediatric medical research.”

For once, the fine print revealed a great positive surprise.

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Don’t Let the Pill Bottle Quantity Fool You

When you see the number of pills in a bottle, along with the strength, you reasonably assume that is what will be inside. So a bottle of 100 aspirin that says 325 milligrams should be just that.

Last year we showed you examples of calcium supplements that didn’t meet that expectation. Now we turn to a similar issue with with these CVS melatonin gummies.

CVS Melatonin Gummies

Here the label clearly says there are 60 gummies in the bottle and it notes the strength as 10 mg. in two places on the front label.

*MOUSE PRINT:

CVS back of label

The dosing instructions on the back say you have to take two gummies in order to get the 10 mg. promised on the front of the label. So in essence, if you thought this bottle would last you two months, it will only be good for one month.

Another CVS melatonin gummy product makes a slightly different representation on the front saying this product is 10 mg. per serving. While a slight improvement, shoppers still could be easily misled.

10 mg per serving

What do you think… shouldn’t the strength of the medication displayed on the front of the bottle be what you get in each pill, capsule, or gummy inside?