Spoon dosing likely cause of dosage errors
Using teaspoons and tablespoons to measure medicine doses can result in dosage errors. A new study by the Cornell Food and Brand Lab says to ditch the spoons and use measuring cups instead.
A previous study Koert van Ittersum, PhD at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) and Brian Wansink, PhD of Cornell University shows that people who spoon-dose tend to to under-serve by 8.4% and when using table spoons they over-serve by 11.6%.
The new study by the same authors shows that the risk of dosage error decreases by around 50% by simply changing the recommended units of measurement from tea spoons to milliliters.
However, whether we’ll use the measuring cups depend more on the medicine makers. People are more likely to use measuring cups when the dosages are in millimeters instead of spoons or teaspoons.
“When measuring medicine for ourselves or our children, we often use regular kitchen spoons but they are not accurate measuring instruments,” explains lead author Koert van Ittersum, “While we feel that we can estimate teaspoon doses, milliliters are much harder to estimate visually, therefore people are more likely to use accurate measuring spoons or cups when given dosage information in milliliters.”
He authors recommend the US Food and Drug Administration enforce that measurements should be in millimeters and suggest that parents should use the provided measuring cups when giving medicine to their children.
Category: Features, Health alert
