HOW TO READ AND UNDERSTAND FOOD LABELS
Food labels are required on almost all foods, except those that don’t provide many nutrients such as coffee, alcohol and spices. Although some restaurants provide information about the food they serve, they aren’t required to have labels. The FDA recommends that sellers provide nutritional information on produce, meat, poultry and seafood, but it’s strictly voluntary.
At the top of a label under Nutrition Facts, you’ll see the serving size and the number of servings in the package. The rest of the nutrition information in the label is based on one serving. In this example, one cup is designated as one serving, and the package contains two servings.
That means that if you eat the whole box of macaroni and cheese, you are eating two servings, not one, so you will have to multiply the number of calories, fat grams and other nutrients by two to get accurate nutrition information.
Until you become accustomed to reading food labels, it’s easy to become confused. Avoid these common mistakes when reading labels:
A label may say that the food is reduced fat or reduced sodium. That means that the amount of fat or sodium has been reduced by 25% from the original product. It doesn’t mean, however, that the food is low in fat or sodium. For example, if a can of soup originally had 1,000 milligrams of sodium, the reduced sodium product would still be a high-sodium food.
Don’t confuse the % DV for fat with the percentage of calories from fat. If the % DV is 15% that doesn’t mean that 15% of the calories comes from fat. Rather, it means that you’re using up 15% of all the fat you need for a day with one serving (based on a meal plan of 2,000 calories per day).
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that the amount of sugar on a label means that the sugar has been added. For example, milk naturally has sugar, which is called lactose. But that doesn’t mean you should stop drinking milk because milk is full of other important nutrients including calcium. What you can do is look at the list of ingredients. If you see the words high-fructose corn syrup or sugar high on the list of ingredients, it probably means refined sugar has been added to the product.
A common mistake people make, especially with packages dispensed from vending machines, is to assume that a small item contains one serving just because the package is small. If you eat a bag of pretzels from a vending machine, for example, you may find that it contains 2.5 servings. So you need to multiply the numbers by 2.5 to figure out how many calories and the amount of sodium and other nutrients you are eating.
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Food Companies really try to trick you with the labels. I just bought Crystal Light “on the go”, the individual packages you just empty into a 16 oz water bottle. Well, that little package is actually 2 servings. It is only 5 calories per serving but I’m sure a lot people don’t know they are drinking 10 calories instead of 5.
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