food labels, contents of food labels, lose weight

Discover the different components listed on food labels and understand them quickly with much ease!

Contents of food labels… what are they?

Way back then, food labels are printed everywhere on the packaging of the food and sometimes you can even find it inside the food package. Mostly, old food labels are printed very small that you actually cannot read it anymore. Until 1994, the Food and Drug Administration regulated the printing of food labels with certain requirements like:

1.Should contain information on how foods may fit into the overall diet of a person.
2.Should show nutritional contents like saturated fats, cholesterol, dietary fiber and other nutrients in amount per serving.
3.Should meet the government definition if light, fat free and low calorie.
4.Should be consistent across different product lines.
5.Should be in common measures.
6.Should be in good reading.

Food labels are printed at the back of food packages in rectangular shape. It contains all necessary information about the nutritional value of a certain food. All food labels are created in standard shape, size and format. One cannot deviate to the format set by the Food and Drug Administration.

Lose weight by defining food label per serving information…

The first thing that we would see on food labels is the amount per serving information. They are standardized recommended amount of snack or meal size portion for human consumption. Serving sizes may vary depending on the nature of the food, but usually they use metric amount for standard measurement. Example:
1.Cereals – one cup per serving
2.Bread – one slice per serving
3.Salad dressing – one teaspoon per serving
4.Chips – 15 chips per serving
5.Ice cream – about 3 grams per serving

Calories are displayed just across the food portion serving, most people look at this value above the rest. One thing that you have to learn when reading calories is that you have to pattern the amount of calories per serving and not by the whole package. Many people commit mistakes by looking at the calorie and keeping them as the amount of calorie for the whole package and not per serving. For example:

One bottle of low fat mayonnaise

One tablespoon per serving = 80 calories

Many people see this as the whole bottle of mayonnaise as 80 calories, not knowing that 80 calories stands for one tablespoon and not the whole bottle.

Another one is when reading nutritional information, you should not only look at the calories alone but also the sodium content and other nutritional component like sugar. Some foods may look low on calories but as you scan the whole food label information you would see that it has high amounts of sodium. Same goes with little sweet treats like cookies and chocolate chips, do not base merely on the calorie content but try to review its sugar content.

Now that you know how to read food label nutritional information, rest assured that you would be more careful when picking food choices.

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