Reading Food Labels

One of the things I try to stress to my clients is the importance of reading the ingredient labels on the foods they are consuming.  Obviously, the more you are eating natural, whole foods (like vegetables, fruits, nuts, and grains) the better for you.  But, if a portion of your diet consists of something out of a box, bag, or can, you should read the ingredient label and find out what you’re ingesting.  So here are some general guidelines to help you in your deciphering of food labels.

1.     The first rule is to realize that the ingredients that are listed on the food label, are listed in order of quantity.  In other words, ingredients are listed from most to least.  So when reading a food label for cereal for example, you’ll typically see “Whole Wheat” listed first because the majority of the product will be made from wheat.  “Sugar” or “High Fructose Corn Syrup” generally will be listed next because most commercial cereals have massive quantities of sugar in them.  I recommend when purchasing any product, that you look for sugar to be listed much further down the ingredients list (if at all).

2.     Secondly, there are words on the labels that you will be unable to pronounce, much less define.  My personal rule of thumb is that if you can’t pronounce a food ingredient OR, you don’t know what the food ingredient is, DON’T EAT IT!  Make a point to try to buy your products when you’re able to identify everything on the ingredient list.  There are literally thousands and thousands of food additives that can cause health related problems.  Here is a great book that you can get that will define exactly each individual ingredient:  Consumer’s Guide to Food Additives

3.      Food manufacturers can be very tricky and clever.  For instance, when reading a label and you see “High Fructose Corn Syrup” on the label, that is just another way of saying SUGAR.  It is found in beverages, candy, frozen desserts, dairy products, meats, luncheon meats, ketchups, etc. 

4.      Don’t just instantly scan to the calories or fat content on a label and assume that those numbers are for the entire item you’re holding.  Make sure that you pay attention to the serving size of that product.  For instance when looking at a can of soup, you can instantly see that it has 150 calories and 10 grams of fat.  But when you look closer, you’ll see that those numbers are based on a serving size of ½ cup.  But most soup cans are approximately 1 ½ cups, so you would need to multiple the calories and fat content by 3, in order to adequately assess how much you’ll be consuming.

And lastly, for more information on deciphering the code of the Nutritional Fact Label, here’s a great explanation from US Food & Drug Administration:

http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/foodlab.html

Tags: Nutrition/Food, Resources