The Truth About Nutrition Labels / 5 Things You Need to Know / Healthy Hacks

The Truth About Nutrition Labels / 5 Things You Need to Know / Healthy Hacks

How to read nutrition labels. This may seem pretty simple, but you may be surprised to find out the truth about nutrition labels. Reading nutrition labels will provide you with a better understanding of what’s in the food you’re eating and an understanding of nutrition labels. Consider this video food labels 101 or food labels explained for reading nutrition labels.

Now let’s get into nutrition labels and the 5 things you need to know food labels nutrition information.

#1 - Information on the label
The first thing we want to discuss is the format and information included on the label. This is nutrition facts label explained. All nutrition labels look pretty much the same. Today, they list the serving size and servings per container at the top, followed by all the nutritional information, such as calories, fat, cholesterol, etc. The ingredients used are listed in order of greatest to least by weight. There are eight common food allergies that are required to be listed if contained in the product’s ingredients: milk, egg, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, wheat, peanuts and soybeans.

#2 - What to look for
Ideally, none of the food we eat would even have a food label since it will all be real food. Unfortunately, that’s not possible for most of us, so what we want to do is focus on ingredients that we can pronounce. My rule of thumb is that, if I don’t know what a bunch of the ingredients or they are or they look like a bunch of chemicals, I avoid it. This is great of you're learning how to read nutrition labels for weight loss. Try to find products with the least amount of ingredients and contain ingredients that you can recognize. When foods, even healthy foods, are processed and placed in products for us to purchase and eat, the nutritional value of these healthy ingredients goes down. Try to find products with minimally processed ingredients.

#3 - Focus on the back of the packaging, not the front.
The front of the packaging is full of marketing. You’ll see words like “healthy” and “all natural” with lots of vegetables and colors to make something appear to be what it isn’t. You may think it is healthy and full of fruits and veggies. Don’t be fooled and flip that container around and find out what’s really inside of what you are eating. Also check the daily percentage of vitamins. If you know that a certain amount of vegetables, such as carrots, are high in vitamin A, check the daily percentage on the nutrition label. If the percentage is really low, there probably aren’t as many carrots in that item.

#4 - Watch out for fat free
I mentioned that earlier that not all fats are bad, but a lot of companies will use the marketing words such as “no fat” or “fat free” on the their products to entice people to purchase it. They will even list the fat content as zero on the nutrition label. When you see this go straight to the ingredients. To make up for the fat, they will often add other unhealthy ingredients or increase the sugar content. And speaking of sugar, that lead us to item #5.

#5 - Sugar in disguise
Companies want to avoid listing sugar as an ingredient, so this often cleverly disguised as something else. This is especially important when figuring out how to read nutrition labels for diabetics. If you see a label with an ingredient ending in -ose, it’s probably sugar and should be avoided. For example, fructose, sucrose, glucose, etc. Look for items that are sweetened with healthier alternatives.

Bonus Tip
How to read nutrition labels serving size. Check the serving size in each item and remember that the nutritional information and daily percentages are per serving. For example, the amount of fat or salt in can of soup may not seem that bad, but if that one can of soup has 2 servings, all those amounts need to be doubled.

I hope you enjoyed this video how to read nutrition facts labels.

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[ConsiderItHealth]

Well done my man. Keep up the good work and educating the public!

[MrNioMoon]

This was helpful. Thank you. You deserve more subscribers, to be honest.

[susanhoppe]

I read ingredients and started taking HFCS out years ago and I don't eat fake sugar. I agree that most things that look single serving, like a juice in a bottle, could have 3 - 4 servings.
There is a movement in the USA to make labels easier to read, so it is interesting.
Thanks for the reminders.

[hellokittie]

I always read labels and I try to choose items with ingredients I can pronounce or identify. Thanks for the tips! The sugar tip will come in handy 😉

[JohannaZee]

The labels are all going to change a little bit now. We have a whole bulletin sheet at our job at Trader Joe's about this. I'll get back to you on that one. But a couple things that aren't going to be on it anymore are the amounts of vitamin C and A for some reason. Some of our labels at Trader Joe's have changed are ready, and I'll take a picture and send it to you.