Understanding Food Labels
Food labels are required on almost all foods, except those that don’t provide many nutrients such as coffee, alcohol and spices. Looking at food labels can guide you to make better food choices and are there to protect and inform the consumer but only if you speak the language.
The labels have to include the name of the food, the name and address of the company, how much is in the package, a list of ingredients and a Nutrition Facts Panel. The nutrition label always lists a serving size, which is an amount of food, such as 1 cup of cereal, two cookies, or five pretzels. If you eat twice the serving listed on the label, you would need to remember to double up all the numbers in the Nutrition Facts section.
While food labels can be helpful they aren’t ideal for kids as they’re based on the percentages of a 2,000-calorie adult diet. But for children who are overweight, reading the food label to find the number of servings in the container and the amount of calories per serving can help you determine how much your child should eat. This is can be difficult if you’re not the best at Maths.
With that in mind, here are 8 tips that can help make it easier for you to use nutrition labels to make quick, informed food choices that contribute to a healthy diet.
1 – Nutritional facts are often shown per 100 grams if the product weighs 250 grams there are 2.5 portions. One serving may contain 100 calories but the whole package contains 25o calories.
2 – Try to avoid buying products with too many ingredients list, the shorter the better all those other ingredients are probably sweeteners, additives and other nasties you don’t really need.
3 – Ingredients on food labels are written in order of quantity, so if sugar or other types of syrup are at the start of the list you’ll now that they contain a lot of sugar. If they’re at the back of the list you’ll know that they’re quantities are lower.
4 – Check out fiber levels in your foods, the higher the levels the better, you’ll feel full for longer and it helps everything move nicely along through your gut.
5 – Watch out for products that claim they’re packed full of added minerals and vitamins. It may sound impressive but it the equivalent of crushing a multivitamin in to make a difference. The more natural the vitamins like from fruit and vegetables are what you sound be aiming for rather than synthetic versions.
6 – Although the amount of trans fats (which are bad for you) isn’t yet listed on most food labels, making them hard to avoid, you can often identify that they are in a food if it lists ‘partially hydrogenated vegetable oil’ on the ingredient list.
7 – When food labels say “made with organic ingredients” it’s only saying that at least 70 percent of the ingredients are organic. The other five percent of ingredients are fair game for pesticides and other chemicals.
8 – If your child has an egg allergy, in addition to looking for the word ‘egg,’ you want to look for the following ingredients, including globulin, eggnog, albumin, yolk, egg white, egg substitutes, mayonnaise, ovalbumin, livetin, ovomucin, ovomucoid, vitellin, and ovovitellin.
While food labels are there to help and guide us they can be a lot of vague terms used like ‘emulsifier’ or ‘flavoring’ where manufacturers are able to hide some of their ingredients. This can be confusing and defeat the purpose of having a food label as a way of informing the customer.
Just remember this rule of thumb, if you’re not sure what’s in it, don’t buy it!
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