If you’re trying to eat healthy or loose weight, learning how to read food labels can help you make wise choices about foods you buy. Most packaged foods in the you buy list nutritional information on the package in a section called the Nutrition Facts.
Sometimes processed foods are falsely advertised as ‘light’, ‘low fat’ or ‘healthy’. The only way to really determine whether or not a food item is good for you is to read the food label.
When you start reading food labels, you begin understand the just how good (or bad) a food item is for you. A food label will provide you information on saturated fat, sodium, total fat, fiber, and cholesterol amount “per serving.”
At the same time, many people find understanding what food labels are saying very confusing. What exactly do those numbers mean, and how can fiber grams, fat grams, and protein grams effect weight loss? I a lot of clients ask me, ‘I have been eating light and low fat foods, why am I still not loosing weight?’
Here are some things you should understand about food labels to help you make wise decisions about the foods you should eat.
The Serving Size
The serving size the first bit of information that is listed on a food label.
The serving size indicates just how much of that food is considered a portion size for one person. Additionally, all of the other data on the package including calories, fat grams, protein, is figured for that 1 serving size.
What does this mean? If you will follow strictly what the serving size is, you will obtain the same amount of nutrients according to the serving size that was given in the label.
For example, if the serving size says one serving size is equal to 10 grams, that would mean the portion size for one person is equivalent to 10 grams of that particular food.
In addition to the serving size, a food label also indicates how many servings the package contains.
For example, a package of potato chips might have a serving size of 10 ounces and contain 12 servings per package. If you ate the entire bag of potato chips you would have eaten 12 times the nutrients, calories, fat, cholesterol.
Fat, Fiber, Cholesterol, Carbohydrates, and Protein
A Food label will also provide important nutritional data you need to stay on your diet regimen. You can determine how much fat, fiber, cholesterol, carbohydrates, and protein are in a food package.
This is important data you need to have if you are following a particular diet, whether it is a low fat diet, Atkins, South Beach, and so on.
Ingredients
The ingredients list tells you exactly what ingredient is in the food product. The listing is usually arranged from the main ingredients that have the greater amount by weight up to the smallest quantity. This simply means that the actual quantity of the food includes the biggest quantity of the main ingredient or the first item and the minimum amount of the very last ingredient.
The ingredients list tells you just how ‘natural’ your food product is. Is it full of dyes and preservatives?
Big things you want to look out for is of course sugar, oils, and salt. But the two major ingredients you want to avoid is high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oils.
While, reading food labels can be very tedious and confusing, once you get the hang of it, it would be easier for you to watch your diet because you can already control the amount of food that you take.
Fatal error: Call to undefined function sociable_html() in /home/moderndi/public_html/wp-content/themes/mytheme/single.php on line 52