This poster is keen to stress how fat-free the advertised product is. But somehow, the drafters mixed up their directions. The text says, in both Spanish and English that the product could contain ‘up to 0% fat’.
So, the product has 0% fat, or even less—but wait, ‘less than 0%’ is a negative number. That is impossible, unless the claim is that the product contains some fat-busting material that will reduce the amount of fat in your body when you eat it. That doesn’t seem very likely, though.
Perhaps the copywriters intended the wording to be ironic in some way, knowing that the literal meaning is. But if that was the intention, the irony evades me.
I think the most likely explanation is that the writers meant to say that the product contains very little fat, certainly very close to zero and perhaps even zero itself. But they forgot that, when combined with an expression for a numerical limit, ‘up to’ literally means approaching the limit from below, not from above.
I did wonder whether the problem was just in the translation. Could Spanish hasta have a sense of approaching the numerical limit from either direction, not necessarily from below? But my Spanish brother-in-law Juan Francisco told me he found the Spanish wording as odd as I found the English wording, and for the same reason. I enjoyed chewing over this wording problem, but felt no urge to go and find the product.