Whether you're trying to lose weight or have to watch what you eat because of a medical condition, tracking your food intake with nutrition facts labels may be an important part of your diet. Food nutrition labels are designed to make it easy for you to understand the nutritional value of the foods you eat, the Food and Drug Administration, FDA, reports. These labels should make it easier for you to understand how the foods you eat each week affect your diet.
Step 1
Keep a log of all the foods you eat throughout the week. It may be easier to break down a meal by its individual components. For example, if you have an English muffin with cream cheese, a banana and a glass or orange juice for breakfast, the components of your meal would be an English muffin, cream cheese, a banana and orange juice.
Step 2
Familiarize yourself with the serving sizes for the foods on your list and note the amount of servings you have eaten. For the above example, an entire English muffin is one serving. The serving size for orange juice is typically 8 ounces, and the serving size for cream cheese is 1 ounce. The FDA requires that nutrition labels clearly state a food's serving size at the top of the nutrition facts label.
Step 3
Use an online nutrient database or a book containing nutritional values to look up the nutrition data for all the fresh foods you eat each week that do not contain nutrition labels. Fresh foods are not required to contain nutrition facts labels.
Step 4
Add your total values for each nutrient listed on the nutrition labels -- calories, fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrates, protein and essential vitamins and minerals. Depending on how detailed you want to be, you can include subcategories such as saturated fat, trans fat, monounsaturated fat and polyunsaturated fat under the fat category and dietary fiber and sugars under the carbohydrate category.
Step 5
Create a weekly report of your nutritional intakes broken down by nutrient. It may be helpful to break down the information day by day.
Step 6
Compare the nutritional values you consumed to the recommended daily intakes set forth in the USDA's Dietary Guidelines or the intakes recommended by your doctor. For example, if you eat 2,000 calories a day, your fat intake should not exceed 65 g, the USDA reports. Additionally, sodium intake should be less than 2,400 mg a day, and you should get between 45 percent and 65 percent of your total daily calories from carbohydrates.
Tips and Warnings
- Calculating your nutrition intake a week at a time can be more time-consuming than doing one day's worth of information at a time. If you are trying to eat better and be more aware of what you eat, consider setting aside 10 or 15 minutes at the end of the day to calculate the day's intake. At the end of the week, you can add your values for all seven days to get a weekly total. Consider keeping a small notebook with you to record all the foods you eat throughout the day so you do not need to remember everything you ate at the end of the day. If there are foods you eat daily or several times a week, keep a log with the nutritional values so you can use this in your computations. This can be especially helpful for the fruits and vegetables you eat that do not contain nutrition labels. The USDA keeps an extensive online nutrient database organized by alphabetically and by nutrient. This can be helpful for both looking up raw fruits and vegetables and finding nutrient information not included on the nutrition labels.
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