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he nutrition facts label on your favorite breakfast cereal tells you it's full of vitamins and minerals. So it must be healthy, right?
Just because a food is high in vitamins doesn't mean it's healthy overall. Sure, it's great that your favorite cereal gives you a shot of vitamins and minerals. But what if it's also loaded with sugar?
Eating healthy means choosing lots of different types of food throughout the day to get all the nutrients you need, such as vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, fiber, and — yes — even fat.
So how do you figure all this out? Thank goodness for food labels!
Your Cheat Sheet to Good Eats
Labels give you information that can help you decide what to choose as part of an overall healthy eating plan. For example, it may be OK to eat a sugary cereal if you make up for it by not eating much sugary stuff for the rest of the day. Checking the labels on foods can alert you when a food is high in something like sugar so you can be prepared to make tradeoffs.
Food labels provide more than just nutrition facts, though. They also tell you what's in a packaged food (i.e., the ingredients). Some food labels also state which country the food came from, whether the food is organic, and certain health claims.
So who decides what information goes on a food label? In the United States, it's the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA). These agencies require that all food labels show the same nutrition and health information. This allows consumers to compare different foods and make the choices that are right for them.
The FDA and USDA regulate any health claims that companies make on their food labels. When a food says "light" ("lite") or "low fat" on the label, it must meet strict government definitions in order to make that claim. Foods that are labeled "USDA organic" are required to have at least 95% organic ingredients.
Making Food Labels Work for You
The first step in making food labels work for you is to look at the entire label. If you focus on only one part — like calories or vitamins — you may not be getting the full story, like how much sugar or fat is in the product. (Check out our mac and cheese example below to see why the full story is important.)
Serving Size
Always start with the serving size amount. That's because all the information on the rest of the label — from calories to vitamins — is based on that amount.
Take note of how much a serving is (e.g., 1 cup, 8 oz). Sometimes a serving size will be way less than you're used to eating — like only half a cup of cereal. So make sure you check what it is!
The label will also list how many servings are in the package. Even things that seem like they'd be a single serving, such as a bottle of juice or packet of chips, may contain more than one serving. If you eat or drink the whole thing, you're getting more vitamins and minerals but you're also getting way more calories, sugar, fat, and other stuff that you might not want.
Calories
A calorie is a way to measure how much energy a food provides to your body. The number on the food label shows how many calories are in one serving of that food. To get a rough idea of how many calories you need to eat each day, check out the personalized plan calculator on the U.S. government's ChooseMyPlate website.
The calories from fat number tells you how many calories in that serving come from fat. For most people, about 30% of all the calories they eat in a day should come from fat. So if you eat 2,000 calories a day, about 600 of these calories should come from fat.
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