Urban Legend doughnuts

[Q2C4]

My DH has recently taken a liking to Urban Legend doughnuts. I am tempted to ban them from the house due to their advertising strap line which seems to be "Less fat. Less sugar. Less calories."

I would not ban them but I would use a marker pen to cross out 'less' and write 'fewer'.

I'd reject them on pedant grounds - should be 'less fat, less sugar, fewer calories'. [Edit] great minds think alike!

Surely no doughnuts is a better way to stop being/becoming fat?

Befire I pass judgement, exactly how many less calories?

The less v fewer debate is being lost I fear - here is the description from Vinted's standard app update description.

"Less bugs" indeed!!

I think in this instance it might have to be accepted as poetic licence.

They could change it to 'Less calorific' if they wanted to keep the repetition?

I don't know. We use less rather than fewer with measurements of time, money, distance, percentages etc. Calories are also measurements, I don't know that this is strictly wrong? There are others who will know better than me.

Definitely poetic licence though.

Ok yeah, that's the best way to do it.

Less/ fewer bugs, is the least of the grammatical errors in that snippet!

My understanding is that fewer is used for discrete countable things rather than continuous measurements. So you can have 1 person or 2 people, but it's not possible to have 1.5 people, so you say fewer people rather than less.

Calories are a unit of measurement for a continuous quantity - energy. You can have 32.41 calories, you can have 32.48 calories, or any number of values between those two. So you say less calories.

Although I'd say it might have been clearer and more correct to say "Less energy" instead; since they didn't say "Less grams" for sugar or fat.

The normal pedant rule applied is based on count-ability rather than whether the noun is a unit of measurement or the thing being measured. I would argue the latter distinction makes more sense logically, but that isn't apparently how language works! So I would say less energy, but perhaps fewer calories, even though I know the quantity is continuous rather than countable in both cases - but every definition I can find for this relies on the count-ability.

I would want to know what exactly was the basis for the fewer calories: fewer than what?