A single mooncake can push you to your daily limit for fat and sugar

Everyone hopes for a big, bright, full moon for the Mid-Autumn Festival next week, but when it comes to mooncakes, dietitians say we'd be better off with a quarter.

Warnings about the fat and sugar content of the seasonal delicacies are common, but this is the first time consumers have been able to make direct comparisons, thanks to the government's nutrition labelling laws that took effect on July 1.

And a check of the labels shows the warnings are justified: some mooncakes contain almost one-and-a-half times an adult's recommended daily intake of sugar, while for others a single cake could account for a full day's fat consumption.

Eating a whole lotus seed mooncake with two egg yolks from Maxims, Saint Honore, Kee Wah and Wing Wah would put an adult over the recommended sugar limit of 50 grams by up to 45 per cent. A whole Hang Heung mooncake contains 58.7g of fat, very near the daily recommended maximum of 60g.

Flavia U, a former chairwoman of the Hong Kong Dietitian Association and a registered dietitian in Britain, said a mooncake contained as much energy as three bowls of rice, but people shouldn't worry too much provided they knew when to stop.

'Eating just a quarter of a mooncake as a snack is perfectly acceptable,' she said.

Snowy mooncakes are generally perceived as healthier, but a Saint Honore yolk and mung bean flavoured mini mooncake contains 0.4g of trans-fat.