All The Things You Should Take Note Of On A Food Label

Ideally, most of the food we eat would be natural, whole foods that don’t come with nutrition labels, but that isn’t the case as we oftentimes find ourselves grabbing a quick snack that comes in a convenient package to munch.
Nonetheless, making the healthier choice comes down to reading your food label and examining the nutritional breakdown and ingredients.

But what exactly does that mean? People tend to just focus on calories, but there are other items on the nutrition label that deserve your attention. Here is a list of everything you should take note of on your food label.

Serving Size
A lot of packaged foods try to disguise themselves as “healthy” by breaking up serving sizes into smaller portions. For instance, 9 grams (g) of sugar doesn’t seem like a lot for a cereal, until you learn that one serving is only 3/4 of a cup.
Serving size does not always match the amount that you will be eating or drinking.

It is important to make sure you are taking into account how many servings of that food or drink you plan to consume. If a bag of chips has three servings, but you eat the whole bag, you have to multiply everything on the label by three.

Added Sugar
Averagely, people consume about 90 grams of sugar a day, which is more than double the recommended maximum of 36 g of added sugar per day for men.

While these added sugars don’t include naturally-occurring sugars—like the kind in fruit and dairy—packaged foods tend to sneak in sugar for taste. It is best to find something with the lowest amount of sugar possible — but if that’s unavoidable, stick to less than 10 g of sugar per serving.

To know the amount of sugar added to your food, look at the total grams of carbohydrates on the nutrition label and subtract the grams you get from fiber.

Of that number, less than half of the carbs should come from sugar. So if you are eating something that has 20 g of carbs and 4 g of fiber, you would want it to have less than 8 g of sugar.

You can in the alternative avoid anything that has sugar, or any variation of it. There are over 50 words for sugar—listed as one of the first three ingredients.

Ingredients
When eating packaged food, you should know exactly what you’re putting into your body. If you’re not eating a whole food, it helps to choose a packaged option consisting of whole ingredients.

When you jump down to the ingredients, they will be listed in order of weight, so the final product will contain the highest amount of the first ingredient and the least of the last one. The shorter the ingredients list, the better.

You should however focus on the first few ingredients, particularly the first ingredient, the most. Those should typically be easy to read and pronounce.

Protein
Whether you’re looking to build muscle or need a satiating snack, protein is an important macronutrient to look out for on a nutrition label. Protein fills you up and helps repair your muscle tissue after strength training.

Meals should have 30 grams of protein, including those frozen dinners you pick up from the freezer section.

Fiber
One micronutrient that is often overlooked but important for your overall diet is fiber. It fills you up and keeps your colon healthy. It also can help with weight management.

It is best to stick with foods that have at least 3 g of fiber per serving. Although fiber is mostly found in whole foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and legumes, you can still find it in packaged goods, like protein bars, cereal, and whole grain bread.

Trans Fats
Fats aren’t the enemy, but one to keep an eye out for is partially-hydrogenated oil, a type of trans fat.

Trans fats can raise your body’s bad cholesterol, lower its good cholesterol, and increase your risk of heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. The other fats listed on the panel (saturated fat and total fat) are fine, as long as they are within your daily limit.

Roughly 20 to 30 percent of your daily calories should come from fat. Good fats, such as omega-3s and monounsaturated fats, are necessary for your overall diet and can help protect against heart disease.

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