I'm confused about a Nutrition Facts label I read recently. The different types of fat do not add up to the total fat.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), through its Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN), sets forth the basic rules for entering information on a Nutrition Facts Panel. Companies can identify a food as having ‘0’ grams of total fat, or any type of fat, as long as there is less than 0.5 grams of the fat in question in one serving of the food. (Remember, however, that the manufacturer decides what counts as one serving!) Manufacturers are also allowed to round to the nearest whole number when it comes to reporting nutrient information on a Nutrition Facts Panel as long as one serving of the food weighs 5 grams or more. When one serving of the food weighs between 2 and 5 grams, they are allowed to round to the nearest one-half gram, and when one serving weighs less than 2 grams, they are allowed to round to the nearest one-tenth gram.

Where did the other gram of fat ‘disappear to’ in the example you cited? There are many possibile reasons why these fat-related numbers don’t cleanly add up. One serving of the food you describe could have contained as much as 0.49 grams of trans fat, with the label stating 0 grams. It might also have contained up to 1.49 grams of saturated fat, with the label stating 1 gram. The total fat might have actually been as high as 5.49 grams, or as low as 4.51 grams (although most manufacturers would not choose a serving size that showed their product to contain more fat than it actually contained) and the manufacturer could have rounded it to the closest whole number. A more likely scenario would have been for the manufacturer to have chosen a serving size (and recipe) that allowed for a claim of 0 grams trans fat per serving, or 1 gram of saturated fat, even though the product actually contained more trans fat and saturated fat than reported on the Nutrition Facts Panel.