The little nutrition label affixed to most packages contains important information about the nutrient content of food. Learning what to look for can help us make informed choices about what to eat.
Before we covered How to Read Food Labels, today we’ll look at what to look for when reading the “Nutrition Facts” or “Nutritional Information” part of the label.
Energy/Calories
Calories measured in kcals (kilocalories) and kilojoules (kj). In a food, calories can come from fat, protein, or carbohydrate. Your recommended daily guidelines will specify how many calories you should consume. If you eat more calories than your body uses, you will gain weight.
Protein
Shown in grams, good sources of dietary protein are meat, poultry, fish, eggs, milk and milk products. The advantages of nutrients from these sources should be considered against undesirable fat content, and potential lack of carbohydrates and dietary fiber. Choose lean, low-fat, or fat free sources.
Carbohydrates
Fiber and sugar are types of carbohydrates. The best sources of carbohydrates are fruits, vegetables, beans and whole-grain foods like cereals, breads, pasta, and brown rice.
Total carbohydrates sometimes further list the carbohydrates from sugar separately. This measure will not distinguish between naturally occurring sugars and added sugar.
Fat
Fat is an important nutrient your body uses for growth and development. Our bodies need some fat every day. Although eating too much fat can lead to obesity and health problems.
A good rule of thumb is to limit your total fat intake to about 30% of calories. For every 100 calories in a serving, food should have less than 3 grams of fat.
Fiber/Fibre
Fiber helps keep your digestive system healthy and help reduce cholesterol levels. A food is considered a source of fiber if it contains 3 g or more. If it contains 6 g or more then it is a good source of fiber.
Sodium
Sodium is a component of salt. A gram of sodium is equal to 2.5 g of salt. Sodium adds flavour and helps preserve foods consequently processed, packaged and canned foods contain more than fresh foods.
Vitamins and Minerals
Choose foods high in a variety of vitamins and minerals. They help promote good health and may protect you from disease.
If we make our decisions about our food choices based on what foods contain – and sometimes what they don’t contain – food labels can help us make healthier choices.
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Like any diet, it begins with the serving size or portions you lay out for your meals. And in each nutrition label out there, there is a suggested serving size and serving size per container. Makers of these products have standardized these suggestions so it is comparable to similar items out in the market. With the standardization, the units per serving will all be the same. To those who do not diet, they think of these boxes or bags to be of single eating but in reality these bags are suppose to be served more than once.