Be label savvy!

As a dietitian, I’m so accustomed to reading labels that I’m often surprised when I hear many people either don’t bother to read them or don’t know how. It’s so important! There are thousands of products crowding the grocery store aisles — the best way to figure out which ones to drop in your cart is by being label savvy. Here’s your crash course to learning how to get the right amount of calories and the nutrients you need, while avoiding those you don’t:

Serving Size/Servings per container: Always start here. The serving size is given in familiar units such as cups or pieces and influences the number of calories and all the nutrients listed on the label. Say there are two servings in a container and you eat the whole package. You’d have to double all the nutrition information to figure out how many calories and nutrients you took in. Look out for this, in particular, on bottles of sugary drinks — they may seem like single serving sizes, but they’re usually not.

Calories: Most Americans eat more calories than they actually need, so this is a very important category. Always note how many calories are in one serving. Based on a 2,000 calorie diet, a low calorie food will have 40 calories per serving, a moderate food, 100 calories, and a high calorie food, 400 or more.

Categories to limit: How to tell what you should avoid? It’s easier than you think: Just look to the top part of the label. The first half contains nutrients you want to limit, including saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, and sodium.

% Daily Value: This is the number that appears in percentage form on the right side of the label. The % Daily Value is based on a 2,000 calorie diet. It can help determine whether a food is high or low in a particular nutrient. Notice that protein, trans fat, and sugar do not have a % Daily Value — no daily reference has been established for these.

Sugars: The amount of sugar includes both natural and added sugar. Natural sugars may be found in milk (lactose) and fruit (fructose). To test if a food contains a lot of added sugar, check the ingredient list. Ingredients are always listed in descending order, so if sugar is one of the first, you’re looking at a high sugar food. But don’t be fooled: It’s not always listed under that name. Look out for corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, fruit juice concentrate, maltose, dextrose, sucrose, honey, and maple syrup — in a word, sugar.

Fiber and calcium: Generally if a food contains 3 grams or more of fiber per serving, it’s considered a good source. For calcium, look for a food that has 20% of your daily needs, or 200 mg. Adults 18 years and older should receive 1000 mg of calcium a day.

Happy reading!

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