How to Decipher Food Labels

Food labels are a table of contents for prepared foods such as breads, cereals, canned and frozen foods, and those sodas we guzzle to excess. Labels are based on a diet of 2,000 calories a day, but requirements vary for each person depending on age, weight, gender and activity level. Read on to be an educated consumer and a healthy eater.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Read the ingredients. Items appear in descending order from largest to smallest amount. For example, if water is listed first on a bottle of juice, it is the primary ingredient.

2. Be aware of serving sizes. If a package contains five servings, the food label's calorie content is for one of those servings.

3. Examine Calories and Calories from Fat. Read on to Total Fat, an indication of how much fat (in grams) is in a single serving. Below that, the fats are broken down into saturated fats (which are solid at room temperature, come from animal products and contribute to heart disease) and unsaturated fats (which may be broken down further into monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, and are less associated with heart problems because they don't raise cholesterol levels as saturated fats do).

4. Stay on top of cholesterol and sodium content, especially if you have high cholesterol, heart disease or other health concerns.

5. Be skeptical of the terms light or lite, which can refer to the color or texture of a food. However, by law the term free indicates minuscule amounts of fats, cholesterol, sugar, sodium or calories. Calorie-free means fewer than 5 calories per serving, and sugar-free and fat-free both mean less than 0.5 g per serving. Light can indicate either 50 percent or less of the fat than the comparison food or 1/3 fewer calories than the comparison food.

Tips & Warnings

• If you're looking for low-fat foods, a good test is to divide a serving's total number of calories by its total grams of fat. You should end up with roughly 3 g of fat per 100 calories.

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on 8/2/2006 There are four things I look for in the ingredients when I shop for my family of five :
1) White flour (it really has all the nutritional value stripped out of it).
2) Hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils (these are the bad fats).
3) High fructose corn syrup (this one is the worst of all). Natural sugar sends a signal to your brain when you are full and to stop eating. High fructose corn syrup shuts off that switch so you just keep eating!
4) MSG (most people have a food sensitivity to this spice).