Understanding Food Labels Video

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Transcript

Hi. I’m Candy Cumming, a registered dietitian from Sharp HealthCare, and today we’re going to look at food labels and try to make some sense out of them.

So, the first thing you want to look at on the label is serving size because every single piece of information on that label will relate back to the stated serving size. Now sometimes there’s one serving in a container and sometimes it’s multiple servings in a container. Take, for instance, this potpie. This is one where you can really be confused because most of us will eat the whole pie, but if you look at the label, it says there are two servings in this particular package. So, when you look at the calories in here, and how many calories does a person need in a day? You might think, well if I want to weigh about 150 pounds of desired body weight I need about 10 calories per pound of my desired body weight. So if I choose to weigh, say 150, then I need about 1,500 calories a day. So let’s look at this particular piece of processed food here, and look at how many calories are in a portion, but how many would I eat if I ate the whole container.

So, if I look here it’s 520 calories per portion; two portions in this package; at 1,040 calories in this package. More than 2/3 of the calories I need if I’m about a 150-pound person. Whoa, that is like totally overdoing it for one piece of food!

All right, one of the other things we want to check for on the label is the fiber content. And, typically, we’re going to get fiber from fruits, vegetables, whole grains and beans and one of the biggest places we’re going to look from fiber is from a breakfast cereal. And if we look at the old American standard cornflakes and you check the fiber content on that label is 1 gram providing only 4 percent of our fiber for a day. Not a big contributor. On the other hand, we can look for a higher fiber cereal, Fiber One being one of the mother lodes of fiber. And here we could have 9 grams of fiber in the serving size, not 1 gram, and get a third of the fiber we need just from the cereal alone.

One of the other things you want to check for on the label is the sugar that’s in the food. Now, unfortunately, the label doesn’t differentiate between the sugar naturally found in the food and sugar dumped into and added to the food. So say for instance on milk, somebody might look at this and say, "Oh my gosh, there’s sugar in the milk," but that the lactose. That’s the sugar that belongs in the milk and there’s 15 grams of lactose sugar in this milk. No sugar has been added to the milk. On the other hand, I can go and buy yogurt that’s been sweetened and if I look at the label, 27 grams of sugar, and the difference between the 15 and the 27 is added sugar. How do I know there is sugar added? We’re going to look for words that end in –ose, O-S-E — so that would be things like sucrose, high fructose corn syrup and fructose.

And now, you know a lot more about how to use a food label to your advantage.