If you’re reading this article about how to read nutrition labels, you’ve probably been following my series on dieting for dancers. You started out with 8 basic rules. You figured out your body type. In fact, you even learned how to calculate your calories and macronutrients. Wait, what? You don’t know your body type or your daily caloric intake? No worries! Follow those links to get yourself caught up.
The next stage is learning how to make the right nutritional choices to meet your dieting goals. One huge thing you must learn is how to read nutrition labels.
I will admit, I’m a huge believer in making food at home. Using fresh, whole ingredients is such an important aspect of your health, and gives you the ultimate control over what you put in your body. Just read this article from the Washington Post. That said, it’s not always possible to make freshly cooked food. Sometimes you need to eat stuff that comes out of a package.
In this article, I’m going to give you the tools to be able to read nutrition labels. I’m even going to teach you some basic nutritional science terminology so you can make sense out of those confusing lists of ingredients.
Breaking Down Nutrition Labels
The most important thing to master if you truly want to be able to read nutrition labels is understanding how they are broken down. To do this, we’re going to use a nutrition label for milk. For ease of understanding, let’s read the label from the top, down.
How to Read Nutrition Labels: Serving Size
First is serving size. This trips up a lot of people. All of the information below is specifically for the serving size listed. In this case, the serving size is 1 cup, which is 8 ounces of liquid. When you see those commercials for milk, with a celebrity drinking out of a “highball” glass, that glass is more than 8 ounces. Advertising companies are tricky with this. They might tell you there are only 90 calories in a glass of milk, and put up a picture of an athlete drinking out of 12 ounce glass. But in that 12 ounces glass, there are actually 135 calories. So without understanding the significance of serving sizes, you could very likely be loading up on extra calories, sugar, fat, etc, without even realizing it.
How to Read Nutrition Labels: Calories
Next on the label are the main nutrients the FDA has decided we should be worried about. Don’t worry about the % Daily Values in the far right column. That is a percentage based on a 2,000 calorie diet. However, as we discussed in our article about calories here, you could be eating as little as 1,400 calories, or as much as 3,500 calories. In those cases, the percentages would not match, so I suggest just ignoring that column.
How to Read Nutrition Labels: Nutrients
The first nutrient listed is Total Fat, which would be the sum of all types of fat the food contains. In this case, the amount of Total Fat in this cup of milk is 0 grams, which means by default that the amount of Saturated Fat is 0 grams.
After Fat comes Cholesterol and Sodium. I personally don’t track these two nutrients, so I generally just skip ahead to Total Carbohydrates. However, if you prefer to track your cholesterol and sodium, you can find the milligrams listed just to the right of the labels.
Total Carbohydrates, like Total Fat, encompasses all of the types of carbohydrates the food has in it. The most common types of carbohydrates are Dietary Fiber, Sugars, and Alcohol Sugars. If you’re just tracking macronutrients, you only need to pay attention to the Total Carbohydrates. But some people like to track “Net Carbs” instead of Total Carbs. To do this, you need to subtract the grams of Dietary Fiber from the Total, and only count the difference. Let’s say a food has 12 grams of Total Carbohydrates but 5 of those grams are Dietary Fiber. If you subtract 5 from 12, the difference equals 7, which is the number of carbs you count in your diet tracking. I personally don’t track Net Carbs, but that is how you would do it if you chose to do so in your own diet.
The next nutrient listed in this section is Protein, which for this 8-ounce glass of nonfat milk is listed at 8 grams.
Below that box are the micronutrients. In other words, vitamins and minerals. This is always tough because the only amounts given are percentages based on RDA, or “Recommended Daily Allowance”, of different micronutrients. Unfortunately, these RDAs are not a good measurement for everyone. A 50 lbs 6-year-old boy needs much less iron than a 140 lbs 40-year-old woman, for example. So this part of the nutrition label only helps insofar as knowing which vitamins and minerals are present in the food, though not so much in knowing how much of each nutrient there is. For that, you can only measure base on milligrams.
How to Read Nutrition Labels: Ingredients
For this portion of the article, I want to teach you some important tips for reading the list of ingredients. As important in how to read nutrition labels as the macro- and micronutrients are, you also need to be able to read the list of ingredients.
The number one rule: ingredients are listed in order from the ingredient that is most present in the food, to the ingredient that is least present in the food. Let’s take a look at this label for “Nutella & Go”, which is the little pack of Nutella and breadsticks. First it lists the ingredients for the Nutella, then for the breadsticks.
Under the list of ingredients for Nutella, what is ingredient number one? Sugar! And, disgustingly enough, ingredient number two is Palm Oil. That means the two ingredients most present in this food do not give good nutritional value if your goal is to maintain a good shape.
Further down the list is Lecithin as Emulsifier, which is derived from Soy, so if you have issues with Soy, stay away from this product. Last is Vanillin, which is a very common artificial ingredient that I will talk more about later.
The ingredients for the breadsticks are listed next, including Palm Oil (again). Then, at the end of that list are allergy indications. In this case, Soy, because Lecithin derives from Soy.
Food Industry Tricks
The last thing I wanted to talk about are tricks that are used by the food industry to convince you that you are eating healthier than the truth. To do this, I’m going to give you the truth about some common ingredients, and teach you a little nutritional science terminology. Here are the things I will cover:
- Hydrogenated Oils and Trans Fatty Acids
- Vanillin
- Carmine
- Castoreum
- Yellow #5
Hydrogenated Oils and Trans Fat
One thing I didn’t mention above on how to read nutrition labels are the different types of fats, or fatty acids. Four types of fatty acids exist: saturated fat, monounsaturated fat, polyunsaturated fat, and trans fat. There are very important uses in your body for saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fats. All three are important in the right amounts for a well-balanced diet. However, trans fats are nothing but BAD for you! They deliver a double whammy to your body by both raising your LDL (bad cholesterol) and lowering your HDL (good cholesterol).
Hydrogenated oils, or in its most common form, partially hydrogenated oils, are oils that contain trans fat and are, as we discussed, bad for you. But to make things worse, partially hydrogenated oils have been shown to weaken cell membranes, which then allow nasty substances to sneak their ways into your cells. They have been linked to diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and cancer. As such, these oils and their ugly brother, trans fats, are called the “silent killer”.
Vanillin
If you truly want to know how to read nutrition labels, you’d better be able to pick out those nasty artificial flavors. Vanillin is one of the most common. Vanilla, a completely natural flavor made from the bean of the vanilla orchid, is quickly becoming one of the most expensive flavors on the planet, due to the labor-intensive process required to harvest vanilla beans. This leaves many food manufacturers to turn to Vanillin, an artificial – and much cheaper – option.
But before you decide to save a buck by buying a product flavored with Vanillin instead of real vanilla, you should know how Vanillin is made. Completely artificial and created in a lab, and derives directly from wood pulp and other byproducts of the paper industry. I’m not kidding. That box of Dreyer’s Vanilla Ice Cream that has High Fructose Corn Syrup (ahem, really really sweet fake sugar) and Vanillin means you’re pretty much just eating corn byproduct and wood pulp. Does that dollar you saved to buy Dreyer’s still sound good to you?
Carmine
Carmine is a food colorant that is completely natural. So when you read the ingredient list and it says “natural coloring”, or some version of that, it could include carmine. It’s added to foods to make them more red or purple in hue. Why they wouldn’t add beets is beyond me…. But anyway, before you think to yourself, “completely natural! Awesome!” Maybe you should know what carmine is first. Are you ready for it?
Beetlejuice.
I’m completely serious. If you take beetles, beetle eggs, and beetle wings, you boil or dry them, then crush them, they give off a juice that is red in color. Wanna know which foods have them?
Skittles! And Good n’ Plenty! Some ice creams and lemonade mixes, too! Oh, how lovely.
Castoreum
You are going to love this one. Castoreum tastes something like raspberries. As a result, it is often added to foods that need raspberry flavoring. Think raspberry sauce or raspberry ice cream. And castoreum is completely natural, too. Just like carmine! Often, ingredient labels will not list castoreum as an ingredient in-and-of-itself. Instead, it hides in the category of “natural flavors”.
But what is castoreum, you ask? It is secretion from the anal sacs of male beavers. Yep, you read me right. So next time you take a bite of that tasty raspberry ice cream with “natural flavors”, just remember the beavers. Without their anal sac secretions, that raspberry ice cream would cost you an extra 50 cents more!
Yellow #5
The last lovely ingredient on my “Watch Out” list is Yellow #5. The other names for this artificial food colorant is Tartrazine and E102. Therefore, if an ingredient on your food label contains any of those three names, put the product back! Yellow #5 has been linked to a number of health concerns, including migraines, anxiety, blurred vision, and more. Of course, there is also that rumor swirling around about Yellow #5 having a negative effect on men’s sperm count. While not explicitly true, scientific studies have shown tartrazine to have an effect on sperm count in lab tests.
But besides a possibility of lowered sperm count, plus the other side effect listed above, plus behaviourial problems found in children who consume products with Yellow #5 (such as Macaroni and Cheese), you would probably want to avoid tartrazine once you knew what it was made out of. And that, my friends, is coal tar.
Yes, that’s right. Yellow #5 is made out of coal tar. It should disgust you even more to discover that there is an entirely natural and, actually, healthy alternative to Yellow #5 called beta carotene. You may recognize beta carotene as the micronutrient often given credit for improving your eyesight. Beta carotene is also responsible for giving carrots their naturally orange/red hues.
However, the food industry prefers to use coal tar to color their foods because it’s cheaper than beta carotene. So, once again, your choice to save a buck on one box of mac n’ cheese over another means you’re feeding yourself and your kids with coal tar instead of beta carotene. Surely, that dollar isn’t worth it!
A Word on Sugars
I wanted to take this opportunity to educate you a little bit about sugars. I’ll likely write another, more in-depth post about sugars later. But I think it’s important to understand how sugars work and the tricks the food industry uses to hide the fact that they pack sugar into foods.
When we think of sugar, we think mostly of table sugar. In this form, the scientific name is Sucrose. But the important thing to remember is that any ingredient ending with the form -ose is a sugar. Most fruit mainly have the monosaccharide Fructose. There is also Dextrose, Galactose, Maltose, and Lactose. Those are all “simple sugars” that your body will quickly and easily break down into sugar’s simplest form, Glucose. And Glucose is the form that either gets used up as energy, or stored away in fat cells for a rainy day.
Starches are also forms of sugar, called “polysaccharides”. Poly, as opposed to “Monosaccharides” such as the Glucose and Fructose listed above or “Disaccharides” such as Sucrose. Simply put, disaccharides and polysaccharides have more molecular chains in their structure than monosaccharides, which means your body must work hard to digest them. This means it’s a better idea to consume poly- and disaccharides rather than monosaccharides. Since fructose is a monosaccharide, I’d suggest staying away from that. We can assume High Fructose Corn Syrup is probably not too healthy for you either.
A “Polyol” is an alcohol sugar. Anything with the suffix -ol, like Erythritol, Xylitol, and Sorbitol, means it is an alcohol sugar. These are often used to produce intense sweetness and that is longer lasting than their -ose counterparts. Knowing that the -ol suffix automatically means a sugar alcohol helps a lot when deciphering difficult chemical names in ingredient lists. This includes names such as Ethylene Glycol and Fucitol.
Improve Your Reading Skills!
I hope this article helped! Sometimes reading those ingredient labels can be challenging and daunting, especially with all of those crazy sounding names. However, knowing a bit about nutritional science terminology can help a lot. For instance, now you know that -ol and -ose endings automatically mean sugars! Yay!
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