Food Labels

 

 

You should understand food labels if you want to be able to maintain a well balanced, healthy diet.  Younger kids can explore this website by PBS to help you understand food labels.  For older kids and teenagers, this website is probably better for you.

 

Some basic rules to reading food labels:

 

(1) Serving Size:  Always know how much is in a serving.  Let’s say you want to grab a handful of crackers after school.  You’ll probably eat 9 or 10.  If the first choice of crackers has 3 grams of fat in a serving but a serving is one cracker, you would actually eat almost 30 grams of fat in your handful of 9-10 crackers.   If a second type of crackers says the serving size is 30 crackers and there are 3 grams of fat per serving, you would only get 1 gram of fat in your 9-10 crackers.  You should choose the second choice, but you wouldn’t have known this if you didn’t look at how many crackers are in a serving.  You would have thought that a serving of each has 3 grams of fat, so they must be equal foods.

 

(2) Calories:  A person, depending on age and activity level, should have between 1000-3000 calories per day.  Calories are important as they are your body’s energy source; however, if you take in more calories than you use, the extras become body fat.  Follow this link to see a chart that tells you your calorie requirements based on age and activity level.  Remember that on a food label the number of calories listed here is for one serving of that food.

(3) Percent Daily Value:  Try to follow the guidelines.  The Percent Daily Value (% daily value or recommended daily allowance) of various nutrients are general guidelines for the amounts of those nutrients you should have each day.  If a food says that one serving of that food, say a package of orange slices, has 100% of the daily allowance of Vitamin C, you shouldn’t go looking for more Vitamin C that day.  Instead, you can think about getting some yogurt so you can work towards the recommended daily allowance of calcium.

 

 

(4) Nutritional Values:  Look to the left to see the amounts (often in grams) of various nutrients.  Here you will see amounts of fat, cholesterol, sodium (a mineral), carbohydrates, protein, fiber, and other nutrients.  Remember that the number shown is the amount per serving—see (1) above.

 

(5) Other Vitamins and Minerals:  Below the primary nutrients you will see some values for various vitamins and minerals.  These are listed only as percent of daily values—see (3) above.

 

(6) Ingredients:

 

Pay attention to the order of the ingredients.  Ingredients are listed in order of the most to the least.  So, try not to choose foods with sugar or “high fructose corn syrup” listed first.

 

More is not necessarily better.  If the ingredient list is long and full of chemical names that you can’t pronounce or haven’t heard of, it’s probably not a healthy choice.

 

 

Below you will find an 8 minute video from the Food and Drug Administration on reading food labels.

 

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