In Japan, food and beverage makers have not traditionally done that much in the way of labeling nutritional values. Often times, in fact, when you get an imported item from abroad, the nutritional information is intentionally covered up by a sticker in Japanese with more lax standards on what to report. Don’t count on Japanese people knowing what “trans-fats” are, or how much cholesterol is in stuff, or even to be aware of saturated fats. Generally speaking, you won’t hear about that stuff here.

But they do have to give basics, and one of the basics is calories. At right is from a bottle of Gatorade, but it’s pretty standard. Note the calorie count–26! Pretty low, right? Well, a closer look shows you the little trick they thought up: these are the values for 100 milliliters of the drink, and the bottle is 500 ml. So you have to multiply by five.

Admittedly, it’s a standard trick–how often has a food label’s “serving size” matched the amount you really ate? Still, it is possible that you might nosh on eleven pretzels, two small cookies, or a handful of potato chips. But using such a division on a single-serving drink? Who drinks one-fifth of a bottle of Gatorade, or any other such drink?

This is one of those “lying by telling the truth” techniques, where you jigger the facts enough so that you are technically telling the truth, but at the same time, you are straining as hard as you can to create a more favorable misinterpretation. Kind of like using “Saddam Hussein,” “9/11,” “The Iraq War” and “The War on Terror” so often intermingled and interchangeable that two-thirds of the people believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 and that the hijackers came from Iraq, even when such things are obviously untrue. And in the end, you can stand up and say, “Hey, I never claimed that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were involved in 9/11.” But, of course, you did, and that’s the point: if you speak only facts, but you distort them so as to give a false impression, it doesn’t matter if you never came right out and said anything untrue in so many words. The fact that you designed your message to portray a lie makes it a lie.

A Libertarian might say about the drink bottle, let the buyer beware. Me, I favor making it illegal to intentionally lie to people when advertising or giving nutritional information. This is the kind of thing that right-wingers talk about when they say that people like me want “Big Brother,” or government control over our lives. Me, I’ll pass on the warrantless wiretapping, thank you, and opt for the laws against consumer fraud.

Hey, I’m getting back into blogging form again–I squeezed a political statement out of a soft drink label!