Cheater, Cheater, Soup-Eater

There are lots of ways to "cheat" on the Weight Watchers diet without actually cheating. Most of them involve abusing the way points are calculated so that you're skating as close as possible to having to spend another point without quite getting there... This is one reason why, the first time I was on this diet (ten or so years ago), I lost twenty-five pounds and then slammed into a brick wall. This time around, I promised myself that I would try to follow the spirit of the law in addition to its letter, and I'm doing much better.

They didn't have the online tools back then. The online tools are handy, and mean I don't have to carry a converter doohickey with me everywhere I go. (Which is good, because I'm an online-only member, so they don't give me a converter doohickey to carry.) It's worth noting that the sidebar calculator doesn't work quite the same way as the database's calculator. The sidebar rounds to the nearest whole point, whereas the database will calculate to the nearest half unit, if your idea of a serving size doesn't match up with its default stored serving size.

You either already know all this, or else I'm boring you silly, or both, but this is worth mentioning so you can understand my complaint.

For a while now, I've enjoyed Campbell's Select Harvest Light soups. WW granted its countenance to the Progresso light soup line, but I think the Campbell's tastes better. When I first found them, they weren't in the WW database, so I had to add them, which wasn't a big deal -- I do that a lot. Let's take, for example, the Italian-Style Vegetable, which is the diet-friendliest of the bunch. According to the can, a serving is 50 calories, 0g fat, and 4g fiber, which is 0 points. But there's 2 servings in the can, and I dunno about anyone else, but I usually eat the whole can. So when I put it in the database, I put it in for "my" serving, which is 100 calories, 0g fat, and 8g fiber, which works out to 1 point. (It's worth nothing that Nutrition Facts labels are allowed to round their numbers off quite a bit, but even if you assume the posted 0g fat is almost 1g, and the 4g fiber is closer to 3g -- moving both of those numbers in the least advantageous direction for me -- it still works out to 1 point for the can of soup.) Which is a pretty damn good deal, and this is why I try to keep a few cans of this stuff around, in case I'm having a Hungry Hungry Hippo day. The other varieties of the soup go up to 3 points/can, and I keep them around too, because 3 points is a good deal for a reasonably filling lunch on a day I'm planning a big dinner.

With me so far? Good.

So the other day, I went to add a snack of some soup to my day's tally, and because I don't want to type "Campbell's Select Harvest Light Italian-Style Vegetable Soup, 1 can" every time, I just put "Campbell Harvest" into the search bar, assuming it would pull up my three or four hand-entered entries and I could click on the one I wanted from there.

Much to my surprise, it pulled up about twelve options: Apparently, WW has added some of the line to its own internal database! Wahoo! I clicked on their entry, and right away was confused. It said 1 cup of soup was 1 point. Well, it's a rounding thing, maybe, I thought. I changed the 1 to a 2, since the whole can is about 2 cups. The points changed to 2.

I blinked. It should have read 1.5, at most.

Now, I was eating a variety of crackers for a while that, between one batch and the next, changed nutrition data on me -- I actually had the two boxes side-by-side, and they were different, even though nothing else about them seemed to have changed. Maybe I hadn't noticed a change in the soup's data? I pulled out a can, but it didn't look different to me. Just to be sure, I re-entered everything into the calculator. It still told me 0 points for 1 cup, and 1 point for the 2-serving can.

Unfortunately, WW doesn't tell you what nutrition data they're basing their points on in the database. So as near as I can guess, what's happening is that for whatever reason, they're not accounting for the fiber. What frustrates me is that I'm not sure why -- and the cynical commentator in my brain tells me that it's deliberate, that they're not counting the fiber portion for the Campbell's soup because that makes it look like it's more points than the Progresso, which after all, still has the Weight Watcher's logo on its cans and (presumably) is paying a premium for that endorsement... Shall we do a compare?

The Progresso Light Italian-Style Vegetable has 10 more calories per serving, the same fat and fiber, about 2 fewer grams of non-fiber carbohydrates, and... fewer vitamins/minerals (on average, though Progresso wins on Vitamin C), and more than 50% more sodium (700mg vs 480mg). I'm not kidding: check out the published nutrition information here and here.

I'd like to believe that whoever put the Campbell's data into their database just didn't have the fiber information available, but how likely is that? Not very, considering that, even in absence of an actual can, I managed to find the information online in about thirty seconds.

And how likely is it now that I'm going to stop trusting their database to have the correct data for brand names? That... That's pretty darned likely.