Understanding food labels
The government have announced new plans to tackle obesity and encourage us to lead healthier lives.
Losing weight or maintaining a healthy weight can help to reduce the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer. With this being the case, now is a great time to think about ways to improve your health and wellbeing.
The new obesity strategy outlines a number of measures to promote healthier eating including:
- Banning advertising of food high in fat, sugar or salt on television and online before 9pm
- Ending 'buy one, get one free' promotions on foods high in fat and sugar
- improved calorie labelling in restaurants, cafes and takeaways
- Implementation of alcohol calorie labelling
- Expanding NHS weight management services, through self-care apps
With an emphasis on improved labelling and nutritional information in the strategy, we thought it would be helpful to provide a few tips that could help you make healthier choices when looking at food labels.
1. Nutritional information
Often displayed as a grid on the back or side of packaging, information about energy, fat, saturated fat, carbohydrate, sugars, protein and salt is provided per 100 grams and sometimes per portion. Using the per 100 gram column, instead of per portion, is the fairest way to compare products nutritionally, because otherwise it can be hard to tell whether the differences you see are due to a different portion size rather than the actual content of the product. The most important ones to look at are total fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt. These are the things that are most likely to affect weight, cholesterol and blood pressure, which can increase the risk of heart disease and stroke.
2. Colour labelling
In addition to nutritional information, food packaging often includes red, amber and green symbols to make it easier to choose healthier options. In short, the more green on the label, the healthier the choice. While red on the label means the food is high in fat, saturated fat, salt or sugars and these are the foods to eat less often and in small amounts.
3. Reference intake
Reference intake provides useful guidelines on the amount of energy and nutrients you need for a healthy balanced diet each day. The % reference intake or RI tells you how much of your daily healthy maximum is the portion of the product. For example, a Mars bar contains 30.5g of sugar, which equates to over a third (34%) of the daily reference intake for an adult.
4. Portion size
Red, amber and green labels and reference intake are often based on a manufacturer's idea of a portion size, which might be smaller than the portion you actually eat. This can mean even if a product looks healthy, if you have more than the stated portion, you could end up eating more calories, saturated fat, sugar or salt than you realise.
5. Ingredients
The ingredients in the food are listed in order of weight, which typically means that if an ingredient is high up on the list, there is a lot of it in the food and if it is near to the bottom of the list, there is not much in the food. This can be of use when trying to understand how much fat, saturated fat, sugar or salt is within the product.
6. Light/Lite
For a food to be displayed at "Light" or "Lite" it must be at least 30% lower in at least one typical value, such as calories or fat, than the standard product. However, these foods are often very high in fat or sugar to start with, for example mayonnaise, crisps and cheese. Therefore, although an item may be displayed as "Light" or "Lite", you may still need to limit how much you eat as it could still be high in fat or sugar. The easiest way to compare products is to look at the nutritional information per 100 grams, because a "Light" or "Lite" version of one brand of crisps may contain the same amount of fat or calories as the standard version of another brand.
Hopefully, this information will help you better understand the information that is available on food packaging and make it easier to choose healthier options.