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. Understanding the nutrition information and ingredients list can help you make healthier choices. 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?”
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: But the average American consumes more than 82 grams per day, according to the University of California, San Francisco. Other information: 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.) 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. Noteworthy changes to vitamins/minerals: Other changes: 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 survey by 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: 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. More than telling you what’s in the food, labels on the front are mostly aimed at getting you to buy the product. Take a package off the shelf and on its face you’re likely to see: You might also see: Health claims of various stripes, third-party certification labels and some nutrition information that’s similar, though not identical, to what’s on the Nutrition Facts Panel. In 2011, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Food Marketing Institute set up a voluntary program called Nutrition Keys, a horizontal nutrient snapshot that has been described as a set of piano keys, a row of teeth or a shield. Now called Facts Up Front, what’s displayed is “an industry-created version of the Nutrition Facts Panel that only gives you the good news,” said Ms. MacCleery. “The Nutrition Facts panel is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Having been in wide use ever since, there are no current plans to roll out a federally regulated front-of-pack nutrition labeling scheme. So, on the whole it’s best to bring a skeptical eye to this part of the package. Psychology research has found that we tend to behave in bizarre ways in response to the absence of certain ingredients perceived as bad. It’s a phenomenon known as “health halos.” Seeing labels like “low-fat” and “gluten-free” will lead most of us to consume more of the product than we would have of the original version, because in our minds they are healthier and lower in calories. In reality, those products are typically about the same calorically and the same or worse nutritionally (depending on the replacement ingredients). Health halos apply to other elements, like the imagery on a package. “There are a lot of attempts in the food marketplace to make foods that aren’t great for you seem healthier, because they know that consumers are drawn to less healthy foods,” said Ms. MacCleery. “We all are. And what we need to do is find ways to give ourselves mental permission to consume, say potato chips. So they’ll put stamps and claims and pictures of vegetables all over say, veggie sticks, and then what’s inside is potato chips with a little dusting of spinach. And we might even eat more of those than a bag of potato chips because we think we’re doing something that’s good for our bodies. They use our mental landscape against us.” Although product images aren’t supposed to be misleading, they often are, according to Ms. MacCleery. An emphasized ingredient or flavor might not be listed as high in the ingredients list as you’d expect, or it might not be represented in the way you’d think. Take, for example, strawberry-flavored toaster pastries. There could be a photo of strawberries on the front, so you might think you’re getting a premium ingredient or including more variety in your diet, but in the list, no strawberries to be found: instead, you might find pureed apple with red 40 dye and artificial strawberry flavor. A label might say “0 grams trans fat” on the front but be quite high in saturated fat. Or a label might say “No added sugar” on the front but be quite high in sodium. You might not realize either of these without turning over the product to check the Nutrition Facts panel. Under the Facts Up Front system from the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Food Marketing Institute, you may notice that the numbers are large and the percent Daily Value is quite small. This is “a big disinformation act to confuse you about what’s important to read,” said Mr. Mande. When designing the original Nutrition Facts panel, Mr. Mande and his colleagues at the F.D.A. conducted research at malls in which social scientists gave consumers various tests about labels. While consumers reported hating percentages, they actually performed by far the best with them compared to other reference points like raw numbers. (Plus, as a shorthand, you can consider something “low” if it provides 5 percent or less of a Daily Value, and “high” if it provides above 20 percent; everything else is in between.) So why is a percentage more effective? It puts everything on a single scale. Health claims authorized by the F.D.A. do exist (for example, “Diets low in sodium may reduce the risk of high blood pressure, a disease associated with many factors.”), but it’s a tall order to memorize which associations are evidence-based. You’re better off checking the Nutrition Facts panel to know what you’re eating. (If you’re curious, though, the full list can be found online.) In addition to requiring use of the Nutrition Facts label, ingredients list and various other elements like the product’s standard name and net contents, the F.D.A. also regulates certain words and claims. But even those that do have standardized definitions behind them might not mean what you’d expect. Here are three examples of claims that are generally misleading and not worth paying attention to: If you have a specific health goal in mind, here are some tips for getting the most out of various labels. In general, we’ve seen a welcome shift away from the long history of evaluating the merits of a given food based on tallies of individual nutrients, toward a more holistic assessment of whole foods for the full set of benefits they may offer. Put another way, it’s helpful to think about the overall nutritional profile of a given food or product: Will it do me harm? Will it do me good? Try not to get too caught up in whether you’re at 71 percent of this or that Daily Value, or how many grams of fiber you’ve logged by noon. When comparing one item to another (or one dish to another on a menu), maximize the quality of the foods you choose relative to their quantity: What do you gain for the calories you spend? And how does the mix of foods you eat add up in a given day or week? Examples of this ethos in practice: Much ink has been spilled on whether “a calorie is a calorie.” In short, yes, on a cellular level, and no, on many other levels. Dr. Walter Willett, a professor and the former chairman of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, notes in his book “Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy”: “The amount of energy a particular food can deliver to mitochondria — the tiny engines that power your cells—is measured in calories.” For most people eating a mix of foods, our bodies convert carbohydrates, fats and protein to energy at the same rate. But calories are different, too: In general, calorie quality is more important than just the number in isolation, meaning where the calories come from, as that translates more or less into nutritional bang for your buck. Two hundred calories from an avocado, say (which offers healthy fats and other nutrients) can be a better choice than only eating 100 calories from, say, sliced deli meats (which are often high in saturated fat and sodium). Or if you eat 100 calories in the form of an apple, chances are you’re going to feel pretty full for a while. Fiber helps slow the absorption of sugar, whereas if you consume 100 calories as soda, you’ll probably notice no difference in how hungry you are. All told, the quality of the calories and the number of calories you consume are interrelated. Both are important for maintaining a healthy weight and increasing your chances of other long-term health benefits. Online calculators can help you check your recommended daily calories. There are three main components of grains: the bran, germ and endosperm. Refined grains have removed the bran and germ—to have longer shelf life and be finer and lighter in terms of flour—whereas true whole grains keep these intact. They offer dietary fiber, healthy fats, protein and many vitamins and minerals. Eating whole grains has been linked to a range of positive health outcomes. Shoot for at least half of your total grains consumed to be whole grains, according to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. (Each day, aim for 48 grams = three servings.) A good tool for checking whole-grain content on packages is the Oldways Whole Grains Council’s stamp system.
For those with food allergies, small amounts of trace ingredients can cause serious symptoms or even be life-threatening. A few general tips to remember as you navigate food labels to align with your health goals: Whenever something gets removed from a processed food product — say, fat — it needs to be replaced with something that serves a similar function (desired texture, shelf life, flavor, color, etc.). “It’s physics,” Mr. Mande said. “There’s still food there.” Focus on healthy dietary patterns overall, such as the well-studied Mediterranean Diet — mostly fruits, vegetables, olive oil, nuts, seeds, legumes and whole grains—rather than focusing on specific nutrients. For example, if your diet is already high in saturated fat, maybe you’re best off with a daily habit of 1% milk, but if your all-around eating pattern emphasizes healthy, minimally processed, mostly plant-based foods, you’re probably fine opting for 2%. Fortifying processed foods does not make them healthy. In a practice the food studies author Warren Belasco calls “nutrification,” manufacturers of food products may first remove a healthful component found naturally in an ingredient (say, the germ and bran from wheat kernels), then add back in nutrients that would have been in the whole food to start with, slap a label on the box of the processed product touting these attributes, and charge slightly more. Enriched grains are a classic example of this. A better bet is to buy the item that hasn’t had its best nutritional attributes removed through excessive processing in the first place. Reading labels can help you to be a conscious eater in other ways, too. |