• If you’re on a special diet or trying to lose a few pounds, paying a little more attention to food labels could make all the difference.
  
  Whether you are trying to lower cholesterol, cut back on sugar or lose a few pounds, the information on your food label will go a long way in helping you to achieve your goals. Almost all pre-packaged foods now carry nutrition labels, giving you some very valuable information on what’s inside. Learning to look at – and understand – the nutrition label will help you to make a healthier choice when it comes to pre-packaged foods.
  Although we know that looking at labels can help us to choose healthier foods, many of us run into problems understanding the information. Studies show that people often find it hard to read the small print and many of us don’t understand the technical terms used. Often we are unsure about what counts as a lot or a little of some of the nutrients. How much fat is too much? What counts as low fat? Is sodium the same as salt and what is the difference between energy and calories? How can I tell if the food I’m buying is healthy? To answer some of these questions, let’s start with the basics.
  
  What’s on a nutrition label?
  The nutrition label is the part of the food label that gives information about the nutrients in the food. These include energy, carbohydrate, fat and protein but may also include other nutrients like fibre or sodium. By law, food manufacturers do not have to put nutrition labels on their food unless they are making a claim about the food, although most foods do now carry them. Nutrition labels will tell you how much of each nutrient there is in a single serving of the food and in 100g of the food. Looking at the serving information will tell you what you will get if you eat one portion eg. one biscuit. The ‘per 100g’ part lets you compare two foods which may have different serving sizes (eg. two different packets of biscuits) to see which has the most fat or calories or whatever you are interested in. So look at the basics:
  
• Energy:
  When we hear the word ‘energy’ most of us think of bouncing around full of life. When it comes to your nutrition label, ‘energy’ is really talking about the calories in the food. The more ‘energy’ the food has, the more calories it has. Unfortunately, eating a food with lots of ‘energy’ is unlikely to have you bouncing around, but will probably add inches to your waistline if you eat a lot of it!
• Carbohydrate:
  Carbohydrate or ‘carbs’ comes from starchy foods – foods like potatoes, bread, rice and pasta all have lots of carbs. Sugar also comes under the heading of carbs. The label will tell you about the amount of carbohydrate in the food and may also tell you how much of the carbohydrate comes from sugar. Usually you will see something like ‘Carbohydrate 12g of which sugars 10g’.
• Fat:
  Fat can be listed on the label by itself or it may be broken down into saturated, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat. Saturated fat is the ‘unhealthy’ fat, whereas polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats are considered healthy, although too much of any type will make you gain weight. If you have high cholesterol, it is the saturated fat you really need to look out for.
• Salt and Sodium:
  These two cause more confusion than almost anything else. We are all told we need to cut back on salt but most labels only list sodium, so how do we know how much salt is in our food? Where salt is listed on the label we can see very quickly whether there is a lot or a little salt in the food. Where sodium is listed, we need to multiply the figure for sodium by 2.5 to get the amount of salt. This is because sodium is only a small part of salt. We need to keep salt under 6g per day or under 2.4g of sodium.
  
  What counts as a low calorie or low energy food?
  A food that is low in calories or energy must have less than 40kcal per 100g or 20kcal per 100mls for drinks and liquids.
  
  What does reduced calorie or reduced energy mean?
  A food that claims to have reduced calories or energy must have 30% less calories than normal – remember this does not mean it is a low calorie food!
  
  Calorie-free:
  foods that have less than 4kcal per 100ml.
  
  Guideline daily amounts
  Many food manufacturers have started using guideline daily amounts or GDAs as a way of helping people to make healthier food choices. GDAs are based on the amount of each nutrient an average person needs everyday and information is given as a percentage of your recommended daily intake. They are usually based on someone eating 2000 kcal per day. We know that a guideline for fat for someone who eats 2000 kcal per day is about 70g per day. If a food has 20g of fat then it has 28% of the guideline daily amount for fat. Looking at the percentages on the label can give you a quick idea of what percentage of your daily intake of fat, salt, sugar and calories are in the food. Some food labels also use colours to help make it easier to understand the GDAs. This traffic light system lets you know very quickly if a food is high or low in a nutrient. Green means healthy levels, amber means moderately high and red means very high. Supermarkets who use traffic lights on their foods have reported that consumers are choosing healthier varieties of foods like sandwiches etc.
  
  

What about nutrition claims?
Apart from listing the basic nutrients in food, labels often tell you about special benefits in particular foods. We often see claims like ‘high in calcium’ or ‘a source of fibre’. These claims are carefully controlled by legislation – you can’t just say anything on a food label, there has to be a scientific basis for it. Foods that claim to be a source of a nutrient need to have at least 15% of the recommended daily amount for that nutrient in the food – in other words, the food must have a decent amount of the nutrient present before they can make a claim about it.

Labels in the future
Although nutrition labels are important in helping people to choose healthier food, consumers still run into problems with them. Understanding the information is only half the battle. Many people find the labels hard to read – the print can be very small, the label itself hard to find on the pack. People are often in a hurry shopping and if the label is difficult to find and hard to read they often don’t bother looking at it. The EU is launching a consultation at the moment to try to help overcome some of these issues. They are recommending that the nutrition information be on the front of the pack and may recommend that GDA’s are used to help make it easier for people to understand the information. They have also suggested that all food manufacturers should be using traffic light colours to flag nutrients. The proposals are under discussion at the moment but should result in changes that will make it easier for everyone to choose healthier foods.

What counts as a ‘low-sugar’ food?
A food must have less than 5g of sugar (natural or added) per 100g or 2.5g of sugar per 100mls to be a low sugar food.

• Sugar-free means less than 0.5g of sugar per 100g or per 100ml.
• No added sugar is a term that causes a lot of confusion. No added sugar means there is sugar naturally present in the food, but that no extra sugar has been added. This claim is often used where a fruit juice with its natural sugars is used to sweeten the food instead of ordinary sugar.

What is ‘low-fat’?
A low fat food must have less than 3g of fat per 100g or 1.5g of fat per 100ml. The only exception is low-fat milk, which can have up to 1.8g of fat per 100ml.

What counts as low-saturated fat?
A food must have less than 1.5g of saturated fat to count as a low-saturated fat food. For liquids, there must be less than 0.75g of saturated fat.

What should I look out for?

• Lowering cholesterol?
  Look out for total fat and saturated fat – choose foods with less than 1.5g of saturated fat per 100g
• Lowering blood pressure?
  Look out for salt and sodium. You should aim for less than 6g of salt per day or less than 2.4g of sodium. Choose foods with 0.1g of sodium or less per 100g.
• Getting to a healthy weight?
  Watch out for fat and calories/energy. Go for foods with less than 3g of fat per 100g or look for reduced fat/calorie foods. Look out for sugar – choose foods with less than 5g per 100g.
• Looking after diabetes?
  Look out for sugar and total carbs. Remember that foods labelled ‘no added sugar’ still contain sugar, and may have quite a bit.
  
  This information has been reproduced with kind permission of Zahra Publishing, publishers of Easy Health, http://www.easyhealth.ie