Do you know what you eat?

One of the most basic, but important skill, is the ability to read nutrition labels.

The first lesson of reading labels is understanding there is a major difference between the front of a food package and the back. The front of the package is marketing. It’s the food company’s opportunity to convince you to buy their product, and in many cases, exaggerate the health benefits that come from eating that product. This is where the uneducated consumer can be fooled.

The back of the packaging is where the truth really lies. This is where food companies have to reveal what is actually in the food they are selling, and what the calorie and macronutrient breakdown of that food is.

The most important part of any food label is the ingredients list. This is where companies have to be transparent about what is in their food and will tell you the most about what you are eating.

On the ingredients list:  Foods are listed in order, starting with the food that is used in the greatest
amount first, followed in descending order by those ingredients used in smaller amounts.

Minimize foods that have super long ingredients lists (aim for 5 or less as a general rule), or ingredients you don’t recognize or can’t pronounce.

Most real food, won’t have an ingredients list at all. Chicken, beef, fish, bananas, avocado, apples, broccoli shouldn’t even have an ingredients list on them because they are the only ingredient.

The next big important element is the nutrition facts. Nutrition facts will give you the low-down on the calories and macronutrients, as well as a few key vitamins and minerals.

On the nutrition facts:

Pay attention to serving sizes and servings per container. Just because something is in a small package, doesn’t mean that it only contains one serving. Many juices will be 2-3 servings for a small bottle. With some foods like nut butters, it’s amazing how quickly the servings can add up when a serving is only 1 or 2 tablespoons. You can see in the example above, the “complete cookie” is 2 servings, totaling 48g carbs and 28g sugar.

Make a quick comparison between proteins, fats, and carbs. Look for any numbers that seem out of the ordinary or jump out to you. And remember that fats have more than twice the caloric load of proteins and carbs, so those should generally be about half of the other two in terms of grams.

Pay attention to sugar content. Most foods have added sugars these days, and many times this is disguised in the ingredients label as syrups or powders. While it’s nearly impossible to avoid all sugar, we want to pay attention to the total amount of sugar we are consuming. Most real foods, besides fruit, will have no sugar, and youshould aim to stay below 5 grams of sugar with most packaged foods.

While nutrition facts certainly expose the truth of calories and macronutrients, it’s important to understand that food manufacturers and food scientists can still manipulate the nutrition facts to make foods look healthier than what they really are.

One example of this is artificial and even natural sweeteners that are “zero-calorie”. Many of these zero-calorie sweeteners still create sugar-like effects within the body, and they aren’t exactly health foods that you want to be consuming large amounts of. So the nutrition facts won’t account for many of these artificial sweeteners and additives, which is why it’s so important to look at BOTH the ingredients and nutrition facts and compare the two.

A final small element to look at on any given food is the expiration date. The obvious reason is because you don’t want to buy or consume expired food, but the less obvious reason is because foods that have a long shelf life are probably reason for suspicion. Real food should spoil, and as a general rule of thumb, we should be eating more foods that have a short shelf life, than those that can sit in our pantry for years at a time.

Just like many of the skills related to dialing in your nutrition…like shopping, meal prep, and tracking your food…becoming great at reading labels will take time. You will see patterns over time, and begin to learn how food companies disguise sugar and other unhealthy ingredients under different names.

For now, start by reading the labels on everything you consume to educate yourself on what you are really putting in your body.

Source: A Frezza