eli5 Why does a 1 serving can of v8 claim to have 2.5 servings of vegetables?
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Because it contains 2.5 servings of liquified and slightly concentrated veggies. When you puree a vegetable, it takes up far less volume than before it was pureed (at least for some veggies). Then concentrate the liquified veggies by removing some water and you get a lot more “veggie servings” in a far smaller space.
A “serving” of a particular product is an entirely arbitrary quantity they set in order to measure the nutritional facts. V8 then refers to the “serving” of vegetables used by the government in the MyPlate dietary recommendations, ~1 cup of raw veg, and says they have ~2.5 servings of veg juiced down into one portion of V8.
It’s language trickery meant to make the product sound super healthy. They could just as easily have set their own “serving” size lower and had 1 serving of vegetables per serving of V8, or 4 to 1, or whatever ratio they want. The FDA has laws that say you can’t be too misleading and a serving size has to correspond to how much a given person would typically consume, but with the right market research you can argue for whatever number you need for your advertising.
A “serving” isn’t a universal size. It is basically a recommended amount for a given substance. So they took 2.5 servings of vegetables, blended them up, put them in a can, and called the can 1 serving of V8.
USDA has recommendations on how much vegetables we should eat per day, as you can see in [this PDF](https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/80400530/pdf/pynet_94.pdf). They recommend 3-5 servings of vegetables per day – and define what they mean by a serving of vegetables. That’s probably the “serving” that the v8 label refers to.
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