What Food Packaging Might Look Like if It Showed Total Calories

If you're dieting and counting calories, we all know the temporary excitement when looking at the nutrition label for your favorite snack and it's "not as bad as I thought!" This excitement quickly disappears once you see the serving size is approximately 1 thimble and you plan on consuming 10 times that amount.

An Instagram page called Calorie Brands reveals the unpleasant caloric truth for some of our favorite guilty pleasures. It features redesigned brand labels that prominently showcase the honest calorie count of the entire contents.

For many, junk food in moderation is something of a necessary evil that can be balanced out with other healthy habits, but we all have those snacks that we tend to devour almost the entire package before we have time to think.

Take a jar of Nutella, which clocks in at a fairly high 200 calories per serving...per 2 TBSP serving. Since you probably won't get nearly 30 servings out of that not-so-big container, the "true label" shows that you're really looking at 4520 calories for the whole jar (which is two times the recommended daily calories for an entire day).

And while we know that we probably shouldn't wind down after a rough day with an entire pint of ice cream...well, sometimes we just feel like we've earned it. Seeing the true calorie total on the front, however, may actually help us stick closer to the serving size, even if we don't decide to slide the carton to far back of the freezer behind the frozen veggies.

While it's true that the key with unhealthy food and snacks is moderation, sometimes that is a little too vague and we need something more visually specific. By going beyond the nutrition label and understanding the true calories in a package of what we're eating (regardless of what they call a 'serving'), we can decide for ourselves what the reasonable amount is and put the decision in our own hands, not theirs.

Via My Modern Met. See more like this by following the Calorie Brands Instagram page.