How to Read a Nutrition Label - Ask a Nutritionist

Transcript:

Leah: Hi everyone, and welcome back to “Ask a Nutritionist” our weekly mini episode of Dishing Up Nutrition. I'm Leah Kleinschrodt, a Registered and Licensed Dietitian with Nutritional Weight & Wellness. Have you ever picked up a product in the grocery store, flipped the package over, glanced at the nutrition label and thought, is this a good choice for me?

Is it the right choice for me? Or, okay, what do all these numbers actually mean? Or do you just end up choosing the product with the prettiest packaging in the end? I'm guilty as charged for that. We've probably all faced these conundrums at some point. As a registered dietitian, I can tell you that nutrition labels aren't meant to be confusing, but they are often misunderstood.

So today we're going to spend some time breaking down and decoding that little black box that's on the back so you can better navigate food choices while you grocery shop. This may actually be a great opportunity for some hands-on learning also. So if you're close to food or a beverage product with a nutrition label, go ahead and grab it. And if you're listening to this at a later date, hit pause if you need to, and you can play along as we walk through how to use this information.

What to look for first when reading a nutrition label

So let's start with probably one of the biggest questions I get with when I'm counseling or teaching classes and we're just getting into how do we navigate the food scene? How do we navigate the grocery store? How do we know what kinds of foods we should be putting in our bodies? So we want to look at when we're reading that nutrition label, what's the most important thing that we're looking at, or what's the first thing that we're looking at? Where should we direct our eyes first?

And many of us just out of habit or practice, go right to looking at fat grams, how many calories there are, the percentage of daily sodium there is. We're looking more at the numbers and the percentages. And these numbers can be helpful in quantifying certain things about the food. But it doesn't tell us about the quality of that food.

So I always recommend to first go to the ingredients list. This tells you what that food actually is. Another way to think about it is that that nutrition facts panel or that nutrition facts box is just the math. The ingredients list is where the story is at. So ingredients are required to be listed in order of weight from the highest to the lowest, so from the most to the least.

The first three ingredients are what this product is mostly made out of. In an ideal world, most of our food actually wouldn't even need an ingredients list or a nutrition label because it's just one ingredient. Meat, like beef or chicken, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds. But of course, we need to be realistic that most people don't eat a hundred percent unprocessed single ingredient foods.

So when we do look at these packages, these are some tips to look for. So if we look at, again, that first three to maybe five ingredients, they should be real whole pronounceable foods that you recognize. That's going to be a great start. If it's sugar, if it's refined flour, if it's something that you really couldn't find in a farmer's field, that's a red flag that it's probably not the best choice no matter what the health claims on the front of the packaging say.

Sometimes food manufacturers will try to be a little tricky and put multiple sources of sugar into a food so that it's a little bit more spread out. So that bumps down further on the list where the sugar starts showing up. And I actually just saw an example of this on a protein bar recently. The sugar source sources that were in this bar were corn syrup, sugar, cane sugar and fructose, so four sources of sugar.

And then if that wasn't enough, they also threw in some sugar alcohols for good measure. So be on the lookout for sources of sugar. Sometimes it's pretty obvious, like some of the ones I just mentioned. Sometimes it'll just blatantly say sugar. Sometimes it'll say cane sugar. Or coconut sugar even.

But you do have to be on the lookout for things that mention different syrups. So corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup solids, brown rice syrup, various things. You'll see various things that end in syrup. Also items that end in O-S-E or -ose. So fructose, glucose, dextrose. This is also another key term that means sugar. But in general, if we can recognize and pronounce every ingredient on the label, that's the ideal scenario.

Why ingredients matter more than numbers

So why do ingredients matter more than numbers? It's easy to get caught up in the labels on the front of the package, like low carb, low fat, zero grams of trans fat, only a hundred calories. Good source of fiber. But here's the truth. A food can look really great on a health claim on the front of the package and still not be supportive of your health.

The front of the package is meant to sell you, and there's a lot of marketing. There's a lot of research, there's a lot of studying that goes into that whole process of what do we put on the front of the package to sell more product to the consumers?

So what we want to do is bypass what's on the front of the package, and we want to look at the back of the package. That's where the real story is at. For example, a product can be labeled as low calorie, but be highly processed and be void of most nutrients. It can be labeled low fat, but still packed with added sugars to make up for the taste.

It can be high protein and still be full of artificial flavorings, nitrates, or other fillers. When foods are made mostly of real recognizable ingredients, your body knows what to do with them. They digest better. They keep you full for longer, and they support blood sugar balance better.

So before you analyze just the numbers on the label, flip straight to that ingredients list and ask yourself, is this made mostly of real food? Do I have many of these ingredients in my own kitchen? And if those answers are yes, then most likely you're on the right track.

Overviewing serving size

Now before we dive into the specifics of carbs, fats, proteins, we do have to talk about serving size because everything else on that nutrition facts label is based on the serving size. It may surprise you that the serving size on the nutrition facts panel is not a recommendation based on health or even a suggestion of what you should consume.

It's defined by FDA standards to reflect an amount that people usually eat in one sitting. And again, this is based on looking at various research and national eating data. So in 2016, the FDA updated nutrition labeling to reflect modern, larger serving sizes than previous data that was from the early 1990s.

One example of this is that a serving of ice cream, if you were to get a package or get a container of that from the grocery store, say around the year 2000, the serving size would often say a half a cup. Now as of 2016, so if you go to a store and pick up a container of ice cream now, the serving size is likely going to say two thirds of a cup.

So did ice cream all of a sudden become healthier so now we can eat more? No, it's just that that serving size now reflects our more modern eating habits that we typically are sitting down and eating larger serving sizes these days. So it just goes to show the serving, use that serving size number as context, not necessarily as a guideline to follow.

Breaking down the nutrition facts panel, starting with carbohydrates

So let's now go deeper into that nutrition facts panel. We're going to break down each category. We're going to start with carbohydrates. This is where a lot of confusion, a lot of fear can show up. So let's break down the carbohydrate section. In bolded text, you'll see total carbohydrate listed out first, and then we go into the breakdown of dietary fiber, total sugars, and also added sugars.

So those are non-blooded text that you'll see in a little bit smaller text underneath that total carbohydrates list. So here's a suggestion I should say, of how we would want to approach that carbohydrate section. Personally, I do take a quick glance at what the total carbohydrate content of that food for that serving size is. And that's mostly just to get a reference point for the rest of the information that's underneath it.

So I take a look and say, all right, the total carbohydrates in this product, do I expect them to be higher because it is a, I expect it to be a starchier or a higher carbohydrate food, or is it pretty low because I also expect it to be a low carbohydrate food? Does it meet my expectations? But after I look at that, I quickly move on to what those carbohydrates are made out of.

So cue the added sugars. Added sugars are exactly what they sound like. They're sugars that are added during processing. So a great health goal is no added sugar, or at least keeping it very minimal. The American Heart Association will tell you to keep added sugars to under 24 grams of added sugars per day, and that can add up fast depending on what products you're looking at or what products you're eating.

If I see that there's more than a few grams of added sugar per serving in a product, I'm probably going to put it back on the shelf and see if I can find either an unsweetened option or I may decide to skip that product altogether.

So then I, next I'm looking at the fiber content of that product. So fiber we know and we love it. It slows digestion, it supports gut health. It helps keep our blood sugar steady. It does a lot of great things for our health. In general, more fiber equals better blood sugar response from that food, and it keeps us fuller, keeps us more satisfied.

A whole food, whole food carbohydrates naturally contain fiber, so we want to be looking, does this product have one or two grams of fiber, or does it have 4, 5, 8 grams of fiber? Ideally, we want to be aiming for at least 30 grams of fiber each day. So anywhere you can pack in a little extra fiber or get more bang for your buck, it's probably going to be worth it.

-----

Overall carbohydrates from real whole foods in reasonable amounts, that's not going to be a problem. It's the low fiber, high sugar, very processed carbohydrates. So think about like going to like wheat flour, where like now we've broken down that wheat product into a very, a very soft, very easily digestible type of product that's going to hit those blood sugars hard.

That's where we tend to run into problems. And so we take that wheat flour, we make it into a whole lot of things like pastas and breads and crackers and cookies. These are the things that are going to create more problems for our health than they're going to help. All right, so that's the breakdown in the carbohydrate section.

Fat section considerations on a nutrition facts label

Next up, let's talk about the fats section. So on the label, again, in bold, you're going to see total fat in the product. And if you're, if anyone is like me and was really learning a lot about food in school around, looking at fat, total fat was like the thing that you paid attention to because the whole message was, let's avoid fat.

So now the approach is a little bit different, but we still have to be savvy about what the types of fats are that are in the foods that we're eating. So we do see total fats still in bold. It does break it down then into saturated fats. Sometimes you'll still see on the label trans fats and then sometimes you'll also see it broken down even further into polyunsaturated fat and monounsaturated fat.

Trans fats from partially hydrogenated industrial oils were banned several years ago, but foods that contain less than half a gram of trans fats per serving can still be labeled as having zero grams. So even small amounts may still exist in some processed, like packaged snacks, good baked goods, fried foods. That's another one to look for. So again, like let's look at the ingredients list and you're looking for anything partially hydrogenated. If it's a partially hydrogenated some kind of oil, that's where we're looking for clues that that product has some trans fats in it.

So again, what matters most is fat quality. Again, it comes back to those ingredients. We want most of our fats to come from real food sources like olive oil, olives, avocado, avocado oil, different nuts and seeds, nut butters, coconut products, canned coconut milk, real butter. These are very different from fats that actually are coming from the heavily processed or the really refined oils.

So we're thinking canola oil, soybean oil, corn oil. Sometimes you'll just see the umbrella term of vegetable oil in there. These are the fats that create more inflammation. They're more heavily processed, they're more devoid of nutrients. So again, we want quality of fat over quantity.

Saturated fats, just to touch on those for a moment. This is again, comes out of that low fat era of something that we've been told to be cautious of. But saturated fat from full fat dairy products, grass fed meats, coconut, this is, these are not the fats to be feared when eaten in moderation. It's a different story if these fats are coming from ultra processed foods.

Saturated fats that we want to avoid are coming from foods like frostings, frozen pizza, coffee creamers, I mentioned, those fried items like so think fast food. So in short it's with saturated fat, it's what travels with the saturated fat. It's not necessarily the, the saturated fat itself.

Does that saturated fat come along with quality animal proteins, minerals like calcium and fat soluble vitamins like vitamin K, or is the saturated fat coming along for the ride along processed flours, high sugar and high carbohydrate foods? The context of that saturated fat makes all the difference.

Overviewing protein considerations on the nutrition facts label

And lastly, let's chat about protein. Protein is really in the spotlight a lot now, these days. It's also the easiest section to read. There's no subcategories at least on the label, so we have to ask ourselves, all right, is there enough protein in here to help me feel full?

Do I need to add a high protein food to my meal or my snack to balance it out? Longtime listeners of Dishing Up Nutrition and “Ask a Nutritionist” know typically we're aiming for maybe 25 to 40 grams of protein or so at a meal, which amounts to somewhere around four to six ounces at a meal.

And then we're aiming for around 10 to 20 grams of protein at a snack. So we can't forget the protein at the snacks also, which is a, the ballpark of around two ounces, maybe three ounces or so of protein. And does it come from a quality source? Is it real food? Again, is this some kind of meat? Is it fish or seafood, eggs, dairy, high quality whey or a Paleo protein powder?

These would be our recommendations or our preferred sources of protein. Like I said, the market right now for high protein snack foods is huge right now. So if a packaged food product is marketing itself as high protein, but it's not using some of those real food sources, it's just not going to be a great replacement for those real food proteins.

I'm sorry, but protein Pop-Tarts and protein donuts are just not going to be the answer. In a pinch, like while you're traveling or out running errands and you're feeling that blood sugar starting to dip, you may end up having to compromise a little and find, say, like a low added sugar protein bar or bottled protein drinks.

They do exist out there. It's going to be a better option than a high sugar snack or trying to white knuckle your way through and then being starving by the time you get to that next meal. But that's where planning can really be a huge advantage. And also, if we're not making this our regular go-tos, we do have a little bit of room to make to, to be flexible when we're out of, say, our own environment.

Percent daily value considerations on a food label

So last, last thing I do want to touch on, because we do see this again, like I grew up looking at this kind of stuff, looking at a nutrition label. You'll see oftentimes on the right hand side of all those gram numbers on the right hand side, you'll see the percent daily value. Now the percent daily value tells you how much of a nutrient contributes to a general daily diet based on 2000 calories.

But here's the important part. The percent daily value, again, is a tool. It's not the rule. So for example, the fiber daily value is 28 grams per day. So whatever you see, then on the label they're going, they will put a percentage, whatever that food has, is the percentage of that 28 grams per day.

The sodium daily value is 2300 milligrams per day, so whatever you see on the label, you might see 40%. You know, it'll be, that product in that serving size has 40% of that 2300 milligrams per day. These numbers are intentionally conservative and achievable for most people. They're also tied to a 2000 calorie diet, which it was chosen to try to be representative of a rough middle ground.

Again, it's very hard to try to represent a population on a nutrition facts panel, so this is the best attempt that researchers and agencies have used to, to try to like nail it down. So the 2000 calorie diet is the reference point, but it's, it's not necessarily the amount that everyone should be eating.

Your needs may be higher or lower, just depending on your age, your height and your weight, your physical activity, medical conditions that you have, goals that you have for your health. So you can use the percent daily value as a reference point. But I would also say it's okay to not really focus on these numbers at all because the reference that they're using really may not make sense for you on an individual level.

Key main points

So let's, I feel like I, I talked a lot there, but let's put a bow on this and wrap up some of the key main points. So the number one thing, if you're, when you turn that package over and you're looking at the back of the package, we want to look at the ingredients list first. That's going to tell us more of the story versus the math of what's in this product.

When it comes to carbs, fat, and protein, quality matters most, and then you can focus on making sure there is balance between all those three things. The percent daily value is a reference point for the general population, and it uses 2000 calories, but it's really not something that's probably going to be hugely helpful or something that you need to pay much attention to. So I hope that clears up some confusion around how to read a nutrition label, or at least gives you a few points to look at and to focus on, even if you're, if you just needed the bullet point version. If you found this episode helpful, share it with someone who you think might also benefit from listening. We'll talk to you next time.