During the past decade, nutrition fact labels on most of the foods that we buy have been through a significant upgrade.  Nowadays, all food companies have to provide an extremely thorough food nutrition facts label in order to just get their items on the shelves.  You need to understand a number of details concerning these particular nutrition information labels prior to buying any food items.

The very first point that you need to understand will be the serving size.  The serving size can cause quite a bit of confusion because a lot of consumers quickly take a look at how much calories are in a single serving while neglecting to consider just how large (or small) a serving of the item really is.  Here is just one example, let’s say that you are looking for how many calories are in a single serving of peanut butter.  You are pleasantly surprised to find that this particular brand of peanut butter has only 70 calories per serving.  Unfortunately without close examination, you may not be so happy to find that a single serving is only 1/3 of a tablespoon when most people usually put more that 1 tablespoon on their peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  To make the situation even more confusing, you will likely find a similar situation with the jelly.  So in essence without a calculator and a measuring spoon in hand every time you make a PB & J sandwich, you are most certainly underestimating the amount of calories that are in your sandwich.

Furthermore, you need to take into account precisely how many calories you take in per day. When you are looking at the percentage values on the food nutrition facts label, remember that most of them are calculated using a 2000 calorie diet.  But nevertheless, a 2000 calorie diet is tough to stick and could not be possible for most people.  Consider if the consumer happens to be overweight, then more than likely they average amount of calories taken in everyday is much more than that.  On the other hand if the consumer is small, on a diet, or routinely skips meals, then most days their caloric intake will actually be less than 2000 calories.  Therefore if the food nutrition facts label indicates that a particular food item contributes to 18% of your total daily value of carbohydrates, then once again further calculations and adjustments are needed depending on your what calorie value your diet normally is.  And although most people know if it is above or below the norm, 99% of them do not know by how much, making the adjustments difficult, if not impossible.

The final aspect of a food label that you need to pay close attention to is the actual list of ingredients.  One thing the FDA regulations do not require food manufacturers to include on the labels is the percentage that each ingredient contributes to the food’s nutrition value.  This includes such highly talked about ingredients like caffeine, preservatives and/or high fructose corn syrup.  Many food manufacturers argued against such a regulation, because it would essentially require them to publish the recipes of their products.  So in return everyone agreed to system a where the ingredients with the highest concentrations are listed on the label first, with the least used ingredients at the bottom of the list.  Remember to consider these tips, the next time you are reading the labels on your next grocery shopping adventure.