Reading Labels

Do you know what you should be looking for when reading food labels? When you pick an item off the shelf, naturally your eyes are drawn to the largest words on there which would be the nutrition label. What exactly should you be looking for to determine whether it would be worth purchasing or not?

The Facts

The nutrition facts label is the largest, drawing your attention immediately. What it tells though is largely irrelevant. At the top of the label it will tell you how many total servings are in the container (roughly) and how many servings the manufacturer used to measure the breakdown of fats, cholesterol, sodium, etc. This part is important because this is where the manufacturer knows you are looking and they want to entice you into trusting their product so the smaller the serving size the better the numbers look and they know you are looking at the amount of sodium, fat, and sugar.

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There are two important things to remember when looking at the nutrition label:

1. Sodium & fats are good for you
2. Nutrition labels are a waste of time

That's right. Sodium, or salt, is good for you- so is fat!
Sodium helps your body perform many processes including helping bring materials from outside of cells into the cell via the sodium-potassium pump (diffusion). This is a highly important function and unfortunately due to the low-sodium craze of the past couple decades, many cells within your body may be missing out on important nutrients to keep them healthy.

Fats help your body to create strong cell membranes, make hormones, ant-inflammation, AND 70% of your brain is made of fat! Cutting healthy fat from your diet is detrimental to a healthy body.

What to look for

So how can you determine if a product is worth purchasing or not?
Look at the ingredients list.

This tells you everything that is in the product and tells you if the manufacturer is being honest or not. If the product claims to be made from coconuts but the first ingredient is water, second ingredient sugar, and there is likely several other ingredients before the coconut then the manufacturer is being dishonest in their labeling- which legally they can do because it is technically in the ingredients, the discrepancy and what they bank on is you expecting that to be the ingredient of highest concentration. Marketing at its finest.

The picture to the right provides a great example. This is being marketed to athletes, sort of the new 'Gatorade', right? It states that it provides "superior hydration". What gives it superior hydration? Well they do claim coconut is in there and coconut water carries a lot of electrolytes in its natural state (which isn't easily manufactured and doesn't have a long shelf life).

Let's look at the ingredients list to see what the source of "superior hydration" is. First ingredient is filtered water. Ok, not bad for you but water is water and worth the extra money. Second ingredient- pure cane sugar. Sugar. This product is sugar water. There is coconut, that makes third on the list.

The way the ingredients list works is the item listed first has the highest concentration in the product. The further down the list you go the less of that item there is. Does this product sound like it is worth the investment? When it comes to a sports drink, most people aren't athletes and thus don't work hard enough to warrant the consumption of a special drink. If you are losing electrolytes (which is what most sports drinks or special waters claim to help replenish) you can easily replenish those by having some pink Himalayan salt or celtic sea salt on hand. Both of these salts contain the highest number of minerals, closest to what your body has (85 out of a 95 possible). Take a small dose and wash it down with regular water and you just gave your body a boost- way cheaper than investing in fancy sugar water drinks. 

When you go shopping

Here is a quick vetting list for products when you go shopping:

• The less ingredients, the better
• If you can't pronounce it, don't eat it
• Look out for ingredients that end in '-ose' they are sugar by another name

If you want to learn more ways to choose healthy foods and optimize your health, join me September 20th for the Healthy You Master Plan. I will take you through 6 weeks of nutrition truth.
Registration is open, join today!