The back of a food packet is where you will find the most information and of course that means it’s potentially the most confusing place to look. With all of the numbers and small print there, where are you supposed to look for and how should it impact your food choices?
This should all now be a lot easier being that you understand your daily requirements, and the second half of this module along with the entirety of the next one will show you how to apply it, so all we’re going to do here is draw your attention to the specific areas of the label that matter the most.
The ingredients list
This will tell you exactly what is in the food and, as already mentioned, it is written in order of inclusion. If something appears higher on the list then you know there is proportionately more of it in the product than the next ingredient. There are a few things to pay attention to here:
- Added sugars.Because the nutrition table which we will cover in the next section does not differentiate between added or intrinsic sugars, it is the ingredients list in which you need to look for this information. Naturally occurring sugars in dairy and fruit, for example, aren’t something you really need to pay attention to but the added sugars in various other products can increase palatability and caloric density
- If a food has a relatively high amount of sugar in it (either according to the traffic light system or the nutritional table which we’ll come to momentarily) you need to look to the ingredients list to find out whether or not the sugar is added. While all sugars are digested in the same manner and are therefore nutritionally equivalent, a food which has an increased caloric load through added sugars is rarely a good option for anyone looking to maintain their weight. These are the foods (along with higher fat foods) which are easy to overeat on and can cause cravings. Look for sugar, cane sugar, syrups, maltose, dextrose or anything else ending in -ose
- Allergens. Anything which is a common allergen will be written in bold, and anything which has an allergen within it is emboldened too: i.e. if a food has eggs in it they will be in bold (eggs), and if a product contains yoghurt this will be followed by (milk)
- Some ingredients may be unfamiliar, but this is not a reason to necessarily be wary of them. If you see something you don’t recognise, check it out online before making a rash decision. WebMD is a good place to look, and although it has a poor reputation in some circles, Wikipedia is more than good enough to get a reasonable understanding of what something is. This is important because not recognising something doesn’t make it bad. Xanthan gum sounds scary but it’s a potentially beneficial fibre, and E300 is vitamin C, so do your research before passing judgement on an unfamiliar ingredient
- You will see below, trans fats are not allowed to be listed on the label so it is to the ingredients that you must look. As you learned in module 2, trans fats are produced by the process of partial hydrogenation and so it’s down to you to look within the ingredients list for fully or partially hydrogenated oils (fully hydrogenated oils are still likely to contain trans fats). Fortunately, these are becoming rarer and rarer in foods due to legislation and a broad appreciation of their potential negative health impacts