You will need to double all the information on the label to determine exactly what you are taking in.
Calories, Fat, Carbohydrate and Protein:
As with all the other nutrients, these are the amounts per serving. In the example to the left, one cup of Chunky, Cheesy, Rich and Creamy Broccoli Soup has 250 calories. But if you consume the whole package (two servings), you will have taken in 500 calories.
In addition to the total fat per serving, it also tells you the calories from fat, so you can do a quick calculation in your head of what percentage of calories you are eating from fat. In the example, there are 135 calories from fat out of a total of 250 calories. You can see right away that more than half the calories in the soup come from fat. The label also tells you how much of the fat is saturated fat or trans fat.
"Total Carbohydrate" tells you, again, how much carbohydrate per serving. Keep in mind that this includes natural sources, such as the natural sugars in milk or fruit, so it's not always easy to tell from the line labeled "Sugars" where the sugar is coming from without looking at the ingredients list. If a cereal has little added sugar—but contains raisins—the sugar content may look high, but it's just from the natural fruit sugar.
Look at the ingredients list for sugar: sugar, brown sugar, cane sugar, beet sugar, corn syrup, corn syrup solids, brown rice syrup, dextrose, fructose, fruit juice concentrate, high fructose corn syrup, honey, invert sugar, maltodextrin, molasses, raw sugar, turbinado sugar and sucrose are all added sugars. Sometimes food manufacturers use a number of sweeteners in a product—each in small amounts—so the ingredients are "sprinkled" throughout the ingredients list, but taken together they can sometimes add up significantly.
Fiber and sugars are part of the total carbohydrate count. A food with 5 grams or more of fiber per serving is a good source of fiber.
% Daily Value:
Daily Values are standard values developed by the Food and Drug Administration for use on food labels. They are standards used to compare the amount of a nutrient in a food to the amount that is recommended per day, but is based on a 2,000 calorie diet that may not apply to everyone. Even if you know that you don't require that many calories, you can still look at these values to see if a particular food is high or low in a nutrient that you are interested in. In the example above, one serving of the soup provides 30 percent of the Daily Value for calcium, which is quite a bit. But it also has 25 percent of the Daily Value for fat—that means that one-fourth of the recommended fat for the day is packed into 1 cup of soup—that's a lot of fat per serving!
Here are some things to visualize when you are looking at a food label:
- Every 5 grams of fat is a teaspoon of fat (or a pat of butter). In the example above, each cup serving of soup has 15 grams of fat—that's three teaspoons (or one tablespoon), or three pats of butter per serving! If you consume the whole can (two servings), then you are consuming six pats of butter!
- Every 4 grams of sugar is a teaspoon. The soup above has very little sugar—only 2 grams per serving, or about a half a teaspoon. But a 16 oz. bottle of sweetened tea might have 30 grams per serving (and remember, the bottle is two servings of 8 ounces each). If you drink the whole bottle, you'll be drinking 60 grams of sugar—that's 15 teaspoons, or five tablespoons, or just under 1/3 cup!
It really is the most important meal of the day, helping you reach your full quota of daily vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients while also helping to control cholesterol and triglyceride levels, AND regularly eating this early morning meal may even help you live longer. A new study that tracked hundreds of Americans found that people who regularly ate this important meal had lower rates of type 2 diabetes and were less likely to develop heart failure.
You have probably followed weight control programs to lose or gain weight, health or for sport. But there is more to it than just dieting. Nutritional education plays a huge roll. Are you up to date on modern food and its nutritional value, how it was produced or grown, what it was fed, sprayed with or how it was processed? If you are not, your health and lifestyle could be at risk.
Modern food production is geared towards the company's return on investment, profit in other words, with your nutrition coming a second best. This has seen a boom in obesity with more and more desperate people turning to a wide, costly and often dangerous, range of diet products. Weight control is more than just dieting.
You need to understand nutrition, and follow a healthy nutrition program that is safe. You also need to understand why there is such a growing incidence of childhood obesity or why people become "Yoyo" dieters.
Diet management plays an important part in your wellness. It impacts on how you think of yourself, whether underweight or overweight. It also limits your performance in life and in sport. Consider this, most diets encourage smaller meals and the cutting out of oils and fats. This is not a bad idea, but they also reduce the intake of meat and other protein rich sources to cut down the fats and oils. This also cuts down on the protein which is usually not supplemented with enough vegetable protein.
This is where most health issues start. Our diet needs to be balanced and nutritious. We cannot starve our body's 100 trillion cells. They need nutrients & water to stay healthy. That is why any diet that cuts out food groups is generally not good for weight control.
Protein is an important component of every cell in the body
It is an organic compound, composed of 22 amino acids, otherwise known as the building blocks of life. Protein is stored in muscles and organs and the body utilises it to build and repair tissues, as well as for the production of enzymes and hormones.
Proteins also makes it possible for blood to carry oxygen throughout the body. Along with fat and carbohydrates, protein is a "macronutrient," meaning the body needs relatively large amounts of it. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences has concluded that our daily protein requirements should be 10% to 35% of our total caloric intake, with men needing slightly more than women.
A lack of protein can cause loss of muscle mass, decreased immunity, as well as weakening of the heart and respiratory system.
Eating more Muscle Building Protein, will cut down on the amount of unhealthy snacking you do, cutting out the high carb, sugary foods and drinks you consume. The same snacks that give you a short burst of high energy and then leave you drained again, in an energy low, and starving.
Consider the source
You can obtain healthy sources of protein without high levels of saturated fat. For example, soybeans, nuts and whole grains provide protein without much saturated fat and offer plenty of healthful fibre and micronutrients as well.