Demystifying Food Labels

When I do my supermarket tours, one of my primary goals is to teach everyone how to properly read nutritional food labels. It's not enough that I just point to different products and say what's good and bad, because when the store is out of a particular item, or you go to another market, or are on vacation, you need to know how to make those decisions yourself. Luckily, it's not a complicated science. Let's take a look at a label and work our way down.

Serving Size-- It's a half cup for this soup. Did you really plan on sharing this can of soup with 2 and a half of your closest friends? If not, then you need to take that into account when you're looking at the rest of the nutrients. You'll be surprised how small some serving sized actually are. Some granola type cereals are as little as ¼ cup a serving! It's not surprising people gain weight eating "health food" when they end up eating what should be 3 or 4 servings in a sitting. I always figured the serving size for Ritz crackers would be measured by the sleeve. Who knew?

Calories-- This is what everyone used to look at straight away about 15 years ago. Now everyone looks right away at the fat, or maybe carbohydrate content. Nobody seems to care about the lowly calorie anymore. That explain the ever expanding girth of our nation, the calorie is important stuff! If the item is too calorie dense to fit into your nutrition plan, you can stop reading. It's that simple. I don't care how low carb it is and I certainly don't give a hoot how low fat it is. You're not going to have much math here, if it's 3 servings, you multiply by 3 if you plan on eating the whole container.