How to Read a Food Label

https://www.nytimes.com/guides/well/how-to-read-a-food-label?emc=edit_n…

Food labels can seem perplexing, and people often read them with an eye toward different things. Whether you are looking to limit your sugar, cut calories or increase your fiber intake, this guide will help you make sense of the numbers, ingredients and nutritional information packed onto that tiny box. Read on for the information you need to get through the supermarket with ease.

What’s on the Back

Understanding the nutrition information and ingredients list can help you make healthier choices.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR

Pull a container of food from the supermarket shelf, or grab the nearest box from your cupboard, pantry or desk. Flip it over or on its side. Welcome to the Nutrition Facts panel. Good news: You’ve now taken Step 1 of this guide, which is to make a habit of this little gymnastics routine.

If you look at nothing else on the package, look at the Nutrition Facts panel. Knowing how to read the Nutrition Facts panel comes down to quantity and quality. “How much?” and “Of what?”

WHAT'S LISTED?

Serving Size: The amount of the product typically consumed at once.
Calories: The number of calories, or energy, provided by a single serving. 2,000 calories is the average daily reference amount, based on the caloric intake recommended for many average Americans. (Though the exact amount per person is based on factors like age, activity level, height, weight and other health goals.)
Percent Daily Value. The Daily Value is how much of a given nutrient you should either aim to reach (for example, dietary fiber) or keep below (like sodium). Knowing how much of that amount is in a given food can help you keep track.
Nutrients: Fats, carbohydrates, protein and cholesterol, as well as select vitamins and minerals.

TARGETS TO KEEP IN MIND

If you're only going to read one section of this guide, this is the one to focus on. The following reference points are good context to keep in mind when you first look at a food label, otherwise it can be difficult to know whether a given food offers a lot or a little of something you’re trying to dial up or dial down.

The average American adult is encouraged to aim for the following numbers for daily consumption.

Information to pay the most attention to:

Calories: likely, you should be aiming to eat around ~2,000 a day.
Saturated fat: less than 20 grams. Rather than merely trying to keep this number as low as possible, what’s most important is what you replace it with: Aim for healthy (unsaturated) fats, whole grains, fruits and vegetables.
Trans fat: 0 grams. Trans fat is no longer “generally recognized as safe” by the F.D.A. June 18, 2018, was the deadline for manufacturers to eliminate artificial sources of trans fat from all new food products sold in the United States. (The World Health Organization called for the same worldwide by 2023.) Products created before June 18 of this year have until January 1, 2020 to comply.
Sodium: While the Daily Value is 2,300 mg, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and others urge the government recommendation to be lowered to 1,500 mg. This is about 2/3 teaspoon of salt. Over 70 percent of our sodium intake comes from food eaten away from home (processed or prepared foods from the grocery store, or food from restaurants), so along with added sugar, this is one of the most important things to check on the Nutrition Facts panel.
Added sugar: While the Daily Value is 50 grams, the American Heart Association recommends keeping it to 25-36 grams per day:
- Men: 9 teaspoons = 36 grams = 150 calories
- Women: 6 teaspoons = 25 grams = 100 calories

But the average American consumes more than 82 grams per day, according to the University of California, San Francisco.

Dietary fiber: 28 grams. This has been deemed a “nutrient of public health concern” because of the health risks associated with low intake and the fact that the vast majority of Americans don’t get enough. Fiber is important for overall digestive health, so inadequate intake can lead to constipation and other bowel problems; it may also make you not feel as full, which can lead to excess calorie intake and potential weight gain.

Other information:

Total fat: The Food and Drug Administration continues to include this on the panel despite consensus from the nutrition community that the type of fat is far more important; in fact, in 2015, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee recommended removing the upper limit for total fat, which was important because it had led to widespread substitution with refined carbohydrates and sugars that had a net negative effect on diet quality. Skip total fat on the label and focus on minimizing saturated fat (as low as you can go) and trans fat (avoid altogether).
Protein: Almost no one in the United States fails to get enough protein, so with a few exceptions such as elite athletes, most people will automatically get enough protein in a given day by eating a variety of foods.
Cholesterol: While blood cholesterol is an important health consideration, the amount you get from food (dietary cholesterol) is no longer considered as concerning for most people as it once was.
Carbohydrates: Not all carbohydrates are created equal. You can’t tell from the Nutrition Facts panel how many whole grains servings are in a product, so your best bet is to check the ingredients list for first ingredient being a whole grain, such as quinoa, whole grain oats, brown rice, whole-wheat flour, etc. The additional carbohydrate-related information you might glean from the panel is basically added sugar (aim low) and dietary fiber (aim high).

WHY IS THE NUTRITION FACTS PANEL THERE?

Food package regulations related to health and content claims were put in place in 1992. “Before that, there was an explosion of package claims that frequently confused and often misled consumers,” said Jerold Mande, professor of the practice at the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, and a former senior advisor to the commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration. He led the design of the original Nutrition Facts panel. Congress passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act that gave the F.D.A. the mandate “to design a label and require that virtually every package of food have a label on it,” he said. At the time, the law required new information and that it be standardized.

In May 2016, the F.D.A. announced that the Nutrition Facts panel would be updated to reflect the latest nutrition science and to better equip consumers to make informed food choices. It’s already on thousands of products, and it will be on all packaged foods by Jan. 1, 2021 at the latest. (The original deadline for manufacturers who sell more than $10 million worth of food products per year was July 26, 2018, while those with earnings under that threshold had another year, but the F.D.A. announced an 18-month extension in May for both categories.)

WHAT'S NEW

When the Nutrition Facts panel was first published in the ‘90s, fat was the biggest nutritional culprit of poor health, and cardiovascular disease was the greatest health concern. Today, overweight and obesity, and their associated health issues, are the biggest concerns. The newest label draws your eye more to total calories and serving size information, as well as a new feature helping consumers limit added sugar, which used to be difficult to discern from total sugar.

Other recent changes to the information include:

Larger font size for calories, servings per container and serving size.
Bolding the number of calories and serving size.
Updating what a serving size is to reflect how people actually eat, rather than the aspirational (recommended) serving size. Normal serving sizes have increased substantially compared with when the panel was first published in 1994. Ice cream is one of the most commonly misrepresented products: A standard serving had been ½ a cup, yet few among us break out the measuring cup or exercise that level of self-control. Now, 2/3 cup is considered the more realistic reference amount. And if you’re drinking a 20-ounce bottle of soda, you may actually be downing 65 grams of sugar (well above the amount recommended for an entire day), not the 26 grams that might have been noted for one 8-ounce “serving,”
Providing “dual column” labels, which offer the nutrition profile for both a serving and a package, when a product is large enough that it could either be consumed all at once or over multiple sittings. If a bag of chips is the size often sold at a deli to accompany a sandwich (3 ounces), how many of us considers that bag three servings? The new label reveals that the whole bag might contain 420 calories, in addition to noting 140 calories per “serving.”

Until all manufacturers are in compliance with the updated label, a close look at the serving size and some quick multiplication may be on hand before finishing off the whole bag. (My personal pet peeve is when manufacturers list a serving in ounces. As if I carry around a scale!)

Noteworthy changes to vitamins/minerals:

Vitamin D and potassium are now listed. Surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found that many Americans don’t get enough of these micronutrients.
Vitamins A and C are no longer required to be listed. Although deficiencies of both were found in American diets in the early 1990s, the F.D.A. has determined that those are now rare.
Calcium and iron continue to be listed.

Other changes:

Added sugars are now listed as separate from total sugars. The distinction aligns with the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which supported limiting added sugar to no more than 10 percent of total daily calories in order to reach other nutritional needs and stay within recommended daily calorie limits.
Removing calories from fat. More recent studies have shown that it’s the type of fat (trans fat and saturated fat vs. monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats) that matters more than the number of grams ingested.
Changing the footnote to better explain what Percent Daily Value means.
Revising Daily Values for sodium, dietary fiber and vitamin D.

INGREDIENTS LIST

The ingredients list is the second most important component of a food package. This should be your next stop after you check the Nutrition Facts panel. In fact, a recent surveyby the International Food Information Council Foundation found that over half of consumers consult the ingredients list or Nutrition Facts panel often or always before making a food purchasing decision. It’s a good idea to cross-reference the two to see how they align.

Things to keep in mind:

Ingredients are listed in descending order by weight.
The list doesn’t give percentages or relative weights for each ingredient, so it can be difficult to know how much of a jump there is between the first and second ingredients, and again for subsequent ingredients.
The list must be complete.

As a general rule, the first ingredient is the most important in the list. (Ideally, the first ingredient is a healthful whole food such as a type of nut, legume, fruit, vegetable or whole grain.) That said, scanning the first three ingredients can provide a good overall sense of a product’s nutritional profile.

(A word about sugar: In the cast of food ingredients that make up processed foods, sugar is a character by many names, from maltose to molasses, agave nectar to corn syrup. Often small amounts of several different types of sugar are listed to avoid one large amount altogether landing in the beginning of the list. Check out this handy list of 61 synonyms for sugar.)

Another general rule is that you should look for “clean labels” with fewer, simpler and more intuitive sounding ingredients. That said, just because a product has a short list of simple ingredients doesn’t mean it’s good for you. The list for stick butter might be just one, familiar ingredient (e.g., “sweet cream”), but that doesn’t make it healthy.

On the other hand, not all chemicals or additives are inherently bad for health. As Laura MacCleery, policy director for the C.S.P.I., said: “Everything is chemicals; we’re not chemical-phobes, but the F.D.A. doesn’t do a particularly good job of regulating those that aren’t good for you. So the fact that companies are able to put into the marketplace ingredients they don’t know the safety of creates legitimate lack of consumer confidence.” (This happens because in the United States it’s not required that ingredients be tested for safety by the government before they can be put in food.) For those words that aren’t as familiar, C.S.P.I. offers “Chemical Cuisine,” a resource of all the major food additives and their safety ratings.