The ABC of Weight Loss

Reading The Nutrition Labels On Foods

In order to manage your diet, you will want to learn how to read nutritional labels to see what’s in the item you are about to eat. Most foods need to be labelled, so you will be able to find nutritional information for most things you buy at the grocery store.

The label will contain:
• Serving size
• Energy/Number of calories
• Protein
• Amount of fat
• Saturated fat
• Carbohydrates – sugars
• Sodium
• Calcium
• Ingredients lists

You might also find vitamins and mineral content listed at the bottom if the item contains high levels of those.
Here are some tips for reading nutritional labels:

• Always look at the serving size first – Many times, manufacturers will
reduce the serving size to make the food seem like it is lower in
calories or other ingredients than it really is. Most have to the
nutritional value for 100g so that’s a great way to compare 2 similar
products.
• Check the calories and the fat content – Here a simple way to see if
the fat content is too high. Multiply the total fat by 9 and then divide
that number into the total calories. Multiply by 100. If the total is
more than 20%, it’s probably too high in fat calories. For example, if a
product has 5g of fat, and a serving size is 180 calories: 4 x 9 = 45,
45 divided by 180 = 0.25, 0.25 x 100 = 25, so therefore 25% of the
calories within the product come from fat and this is way too high!
• Check the sodium content – If it’s higher than 600mg, you might want
to choose something else. The target sodium content for adults is less
than 2400mg per day, which is easy to hit if you eat a lot of processed
foods.
• Avoid foods with high saturated fat contents – If the total number of
fat grams and the saturated fat grams are close in number, try to find
another item to eat.

Ingredients List
Though you might be able to decipher the numbers on the nutritional label, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look at the ingredients. The best advice is to only buy foods whose labels contain ingredients you recognise. When you find too many ingredients that are chemicals, you might want to avoid that product.

You will also want to avoid excessive amounts of ingredients like:

• Fats – commonly referred to as: vegetable oil, palm oil, butter,
margarine, cream, copha
• Salt – commonly referred to as: sea salt, rock salt, vegetable salt,
sodium chloride, MSG
• Sugar – commonly referred to as: brown sugar, lactose, sucrose,
fructose, honey, dextrose, glucose, malto-dextrin, high fructose corn
syrup, raw sugar, cane sugar, golden syrup

If the product doesn’t have a Nutrition Table, it will at least have an ingredients list, the first ingredient is that one that is in the highest amount in the package. The last ingredient is the one that has the lowest amount. If you can’t avoid these harmful ingredients, at least be sure that they are at the end of the ingredients list.

Because companies realise that you are trying to watch your diet, they will sometimes place promises on the labels that aren’t really true. For example, when something is listed as being 95% fat free, that means that 5% of the food is fat. Also, many fat free foods contain high amounts of sugar in order to make up for the taste loss. ‘Reduced fat’ doesn’t mean no fat; it just means that you are going to have less fat in that item. Find out how much. All plants have no cholesterol in them, so when a label states ‘no cholesterol’ in vegetable products, that’s not really anything special to note.

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