JAMES CARTER And BRADY WALCZAK: The Calorie Shell Game Putting Pounds On You

The “zero-calorie” PAM cooking spray in your pantry might be quietly adding pounds to your waistline. If that sounds impossible, it’s because a loophole in the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) labeling rules lets companies play a cynical numbers game with serving sizes.

Federal regulators, in their wisdom, allow anything under five calories per serving to be labeled as “0 calories.” So manufacturers routinely shrink their stated serving sizes to laughably tiny portions—a “1/4 second spray” in PAM’s case—to squeeze under the five-calorie cutoff.

While 1,117 servings in a 12-oz can is comical, do the math across an entire can and the picture stops being so funny.

A 12oz can of PAM boasts 1,117 servings of 0.25 grams. That’s a total of 279.25 grams. According to online sources, 100 grams of PAM cooking spray original has 792 calories, so an entire 12oz can has roughly 2,200 calories. Only in Washington could 2,200 calories pass for zero!

Now consider a family’s usage. A household that sprays a breakfast pan most days, along with a surface or two for dinner, will consume six to eight cans of PAM per year, quietly delivering 13,200 to 17,600 calories. That translates into as much as five pounds of fat annually from ONE product advertised as “zero-calorie.”

Why can a company get away with calling something “zero” that clearly isn’t? Our labeling laws are stuck in a truth-defying time warp. The FDA says (