Five Quick Steps To Mastering Food Labels
By Latwanas Stephens October 13, 2009 9:00 am
Via: Elev8.com
So far, we’ve discussed marketing slogans and how they can affect your eating habits, and the basics of what we should eat. If we’ve made one conclusion, it’s that we need to understand food labels to get out of the supermarket without a bunch of garbage masquerading as food. Since we probably won’t scrutinize each item we toss into our shopping carts, let’s take the CliffsNotes approach.
Today’s lesson: How to judge a food in 15 seconds or less!
You should learn how to read a label in depth because, sometimes, that’s the only way to tell what you’re really eating.
When in a rush, however, you can still benefit greatly from a cursory glance at a label. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve decided to “just make sure” an item was as healthy as it appeared, only to find out it had an appalling amount of something I had no interest in eating. Here is my quickie checklist. These five steps will barely take enough time to slow the movement of the product from the shelf to your cart and will more than make up for it by extending your life on the back end.
Trans and saturated fats. In the U.S., all packaged foods come with a nutrition facts label. The first place my eyes go is to the fat content. I draw my personal line in the sand at trans fat. We don’t need it, and there is always another food option without it. Trans fat is man-made fat that comes from dubious preparation processes. If an item has any, it goes back on the shelf. Next, I look at saturated fat. We don’t need much of it, and if we eat meat or dairy products, then we have probably met our requirements without it needing to be in our other foods. Next to the number of grams, you’ll see the percentage of your daily requirement that the food contains, eliminating the need for math. If that number is high, be wary. Of course, you must evaluate what you’re buying. Olive oil, for example, is a fat, so it’s going to have a high number. However, you don’t use much. Potato chips, on the other hand, would have a lower number, but you might eat the entire bag, so you should consider that. But that’s obvious stuff, right?
Sugar. The grams of sugar are listed right below “carbohydrates,” near the top of the label. Get instantly suspicious if this number is high. Sports foods are supposed to have sugar because you want to quickly replace blood glycogen lost during exercise. All other foods don’t need it. If you’re buying a dessert item, you’ll expect a high ratio of sugar, but for anything else, you’re probably getting a cheap product that’s poorly produced. Remember that many “low-fat” foods have a lot of sugar—it’s not technically fat. It just makes you fat. Read more.
