Food labels, also known as nutrition labels, provide a wealth of information that can help you combat diseases and conditions, reduce your weight and improve your health. Because nutrition labels are uniform across all food products, you can quickly learn to read and evaluate them on most of your favorite foods and drinks. Understanding how to read nutrition labels will help you meet your diet planning goals.
Calorie Amounts
The most obvious benefit food labels have is that they provide you with the number of calories in the food or drink. To make this information even more convenient, food labels break calories down by serving. For example, a box of cereal may contain 20 or more servings. Since you won't eat a whole box of cereal at one time, you will better plan your diet knowing the serving size you intend to eat and the calories for that serving. A nutrition label for a cereal box might read, "Serving size, 1 cup" then "Servings Per Container, 20" then "Calories Per Serving, 100." You can then quickly calculate that a 2-cup bowl of cereal will have 200 calories. Using a free copy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's "Dietary Guidelines for Americans," you can determine how many calories each person in your family needs each day.
Daily Values
It may not help you to know how many grams or milligrams of a certain nutrient your food contains, or even how many calories it has if you don't know how much that amount is in relation to what you should eat each day. Nutrition labels break down nutrients by the amount of their daily recommended value per serving. For example, your recommended daily allowance for cholesterol is 300 mg. If a serving of a food contains 30 mg of cholesterol, a nutrition label will give you the 30 mg number, and show "10%" under a column headed "% Daily Allowance" to help you in your diet planning.
Fat Information
Nutrition labels not only tell you how much fat is in your food or drink, but what types of fat it contains. Fats come in four types: saturated, monounsaturated, polyunsaturated and trans fats. Organizations such as the American Heart Association recommend you decrease your intake of saturated and trans fats and to get your fats from monounsaturated and polyunsaturated sources. A nutrition label tells you how much total fat the food contains, then lists how much comes from each of the four fats.
Nutrient Information
Not all diet planning focuses on weight loss. Some people need to reduce their saturated fat, cholesterol and sodium, while others may plan their daily diet looking to add more iron or calcium. Food labels provide information on a variety of vitamins, minerals, protein and carbohydrates a food or drink contains. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires nutrition labels to contain information dietary fiber, vitamins A and C, calcium and iron, which the FDA says most American lack in their daily diets.
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