Who has the time to check every label on their supermarket purchases, and even when you have time to read the labels, can you really understand all the numbers and codes mentioned on them?
Let us take time here to find out what the food labels mean, and what they mean to your nutrition and health.
When buying food for the first time, maybe a few of us refer to the food labeling on packaged foods. The mandatory nutritional information panel (NIP) on food labels gives you a clear picture of the nutrients that are crucial for healthy eating.
With its standard format, you will quickly learn to read the order of calories, proteins, total fat, saturated fat, total carbohydrates, sugar and sodium.
The trick is to think first about which nutrients are most relevant to the product:
For example, there is no need to look into the dietary fiber when comparing two kinds of milk, but look into the calcium, vitamin D, or the total fat. Also compare the length of the ingredient lists between two same products and favor the one with fewer additives:
For example, two different hummus dips can differ a lot. Some may contain over 11 ingredients. Now compare this with the ingredients that would be used if you made it from scratch: chickpeas, garlic, lemon juice and tahina. As simple as that.
A Guide to labelling:
Order is important: Ingredients on any nutrition label are listed in order of greatest to least quantity. So often the top three items reveal the nutritional quantity of the food.
Sugar: Look out for words like fruit juice concentrate, honey, golden syrup, sucrose, glucose, dextrose, palm sugar, maltose and corn syrup. They are all different forms of sugar.
Fat: Watch out for the ingredients like shortening, full-cream, coconut oil, ghee and vegetable oil.
What per serving means: Use this to assess your intakes. For example, if we look at a biscuit box, and we see the serving size is four biscuits , then we see fat, sugar, fiber in one serving size, not in the whole box.
Total fat: Low- fat foods must contain three grams or less of total fat per 100 g.
Saturated fat: Aim to keep it as low as possible (bad cholesterol). Make sure there are trans fat in your food labels.
Sugar: Low sugar foods must contain no more than five grams of total sugars per 100g.
Salt: Low- salt foods must contain no more than 120mg of sodium of per 100g.
Dietary fiber: Foods identified as high in fiber must have three grams per serving or more.
Remember, you are what you eat.
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