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Reading Food Labels 101

By Jason Yun

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 13Mar2009 Word count: 462 Viewed: 312 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

In order to become the person you want to be and look great naked you need to know what it is you are eating at all times. You need to know how much you are eating. So you need to become a label reader.

Always start off with the serving size, and the servings per container. All the corresponding info in the label corresponds to the serving size, so it’s very important.

If you’re goal is to get 2000 calories for the day, and you know that you will be eating 5 times today then you know you will need about 400 calories per meal. It doesn’t need to be exact as sometimes those meals are not really complete meals, but wholesome snacks to hold you over. So you might have 3 complete meals averaging 500 calories and 2 snacks averaging 250 calories.

Fat grams can add up the calories quickly because they have 9 calories per gram, compared to the protein and carbohydrates at 4 calories. But fat isn’t the enemy. Some fat is good. Most packages will only list saturated and trans fats. If those 2 don’t add up to the total fat grams then it means the rest of the fat is coming from mono- and poly-unsaturated fats, which is good for you.

Try and avoid high calorie foods, high sugar content foods, sodium, and anything with trans fats in it. Most fruit’s carbohydrate will be from sugar, but that is the exception, as it is completely natural. For best results choose foods high in protein, fiber, vitamins, and minerals.

Also when looking for what to buy, you need to look at the ingredients list.

The first ingredients listed are the ones that have the highest concentration in the product. If you want to stay healthy and live long and have the most optimal chance for fat loss you will stay away from the following ingredients:
 High fructose corn syrup, glucose-fructose syrup, stearate-rich or interestified, hydrogenated oils, partially hydrogenated oils, and any other chemically sounding ingredient.

Watch the ‘TRANS FAT FREE’ Labels too. By law food companies are permitted to list a food as ‘trans fat free’ if it has less than .5 grams of trans fats per serving. And some companies, even went a little further and changed the serving size so they could be under this .5 grams. So instead of 10 being the serving size before, they now changed it to 5, hence making their product ‘TRANS FAT FREE’, and fooling millions of consumers concerned about their health and well-being.

And the same goes for the low-fat, fat-free labels. Fat free needs to be less than .5 grams, low-fat less than 3 grams. By simply changing the serving size they can put they’re label on it, deceiving millions of consumers.

Learn to read the labels.

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