Shopping savvy – nutrition labelling
decoded
Following on from yesterday’s delicious chocolate feast, I
am excited to re-embark my journey towards the purple dress.
As I mentioned earlier, I have a plan and planning is what prevents
these little ‘hiccups’ from turning into full blown pig out sessions that last
for days and days! To be honest, I am
lucky. I have spent nearly five years at
university studying nutrition. This
allows me to walk into any supermarket and make informed food choices after just
a glance at the ingredient list. I can
only imagine how confusing it can be if you didn’t have my screening tool.
Making matters worse, apart from the words fat,
carbohydrate, sugar and protein, there’s also fibre and sodium to be
considered. Where does one even begin to
make sense of this information? What’s
important? What’s not?
The good news is that you don’t need to be an expert in
nutrition to decode the nutrition facts table.
All you need is this simple nutrition screening tool which I am about to
reveal. Remember this and soon you’ll realise
what’s ‘belly’ or ‘heart’ friendly and what’s not.
Ingredient List
You may have noticed that every packaged food item has an
ingredient list, but what you may not know is that all ingredients are listed
in descending order. This means that
heavier ingredients are listed first.
It
should come as no surprise to you that high fat or high sugar foods may have
vegetable fats, oils or sugar listed as their first three ingredients.
Let’s have a look at an easter egg as an example. Ingredients are typically milk chocolate
which is made from (1) milk (likely whole milk); (2) second ingredient is sugar
and (3) third ingredient being cocoa butter.
This particular egg also contains cocoa mass and vegetable fat, sugar,
glucose syrup, dried egg white and flavouring.
Would you now be surprised if I told you that this easter egg is a high
fat and sugar product that should only be enjoyed as a treat; and not as an everyday snack?
Still not convinced?
Then let’s apply a simple screening tool.
Screening tool
Any product that exceeds 10g of fat, 15g of sugar and less
than 5g fibre per 100g of food is not what I like to call ‘an everyday food’. If you still don’t know what I am talking
about, refer to the back of the packaging and look closely at the table called
nutrition information. Follow the column
titled ‘Per 100g’.
Going back to the example of the easter egg, per 100g, it
contains 15.7% fat (over the upper limit of 10g/100g), 64.2% sugar (well over
the cut-off of 15g/100g) and very little fibre at 0.4g (less than 5g/100g).
I am not saying don’t eat easter eggs, but you may want to
think twice before reaching for the third or fourth.
Please comment below, I really love and read all of your comments!
