The year I chose to pay attention to reading nutrition facts for food labels changed my relationship with cooking. I learnt how to cook by eye balling everything. I remember the first time that I learnt how to cook Nigerian stew. Multiple times over one summer, I watched my auntie cook. For one can of plum tomatoes, she grabbed three onions, one big red bell pepper and one scotch bonnet. After repeatedly seeing the same portions, I knew that this combination off by heart. I also knew that it would make enough stew to add meat and last one week for family of six. I didn’t have to read nutrition facts for food labels because watching was learning and observing was studying. It was only four years into my fitness journey that I became consciously aware that there were labels on food products.
After making the decision that competing in a bodybuilding competition wasn’t for me, I switched gears. I reverse dieted back to a healthy bodyweight. At that point, I knew that I wanted to train for strength and performance. My next step was to go into surplus and eat for my goals. Now I grew up in the 90s and was a teen in the early 2000s. If you know anything about that era, there was overload of content about being thin. Mentally, I had to work through detaching myself from that imagery while eating to gain more muscle and strength. It’s something that I consciously do to this day. This is to make sure that my goal is at the forefront of my mind. Learning to cook both by eye balling and reading food labels helped me achieve my strength and performance goals.
What Is A Nutrition Facts For Food Labels
A nutrition facts for food label is a method to help you make informed decisions about your health and what you are consuming. It helps you check the amount of food you are eating and whether they are high in fats, salt and added sugars. In addition, understanding these labels can help you eat a balanced diet, manage your heart health and serving sizes.
How Do I Read Nutrition Facts For Food Labels
Go into your pantry and take out a pre-packaged food i.e. rice or pasta or whatever grain you have available. These labels are going to look different depending on the country you live in, but the information provided is nearly the same. The first section of the nutrition facts for food label is the serving information. This tells you the size of the single serving and the total amount of servings in the container. This amount is the average of what people would typically eat or drink for this particular food. For this oatmeal, the single serving size is 40g and the entire bag is 1kg. This means that there are 25 servings in total.
Next, we have the calorie information. This section shows you the total calories per serving and container. Notice how many calories they are in one serving and compare that with what you eat. For example, Person A eats 80g of oatmeal a day. According to the food label, Person A is eating 298 calories of oatmeal for breakfast. Then to calculate all the nutrients and vitamins that Person A is consuming, we will double everything. On the Swiss packaging labels, they also give you the information per 100g. If maths is not your forte, you can use these figures to easily calculate what you are eating.
The Percent Daily Value
The percent daily value found on nutrition facts food labels tells you the percentage of each nutrient in a single serving. This is related to the recommended daily amount (RDA) per a 2000 calorie diet. I would like to put a caveat here. The 2000 calories is a general guideline of what an adult should be eating. However, this does not take age, height, weight, and the amount of exercise that you do into consideration. If Person A is a competitor in a strength sport such as Strongman, their RDA is going to look different to another adult who exercises less frequently.
Moreover, the idea behind the percent daily value is to help people make better choices regarding their diet. If Person A wants to consume less saturated fats or sodium, they would choose foods with a lower percent daily value. If they wanted to consume more fibre, they would choose foods with a higher percent daily value.
Nutrient Breakdown & Heart Health
On every nutrition facts food label, you will see a breakdown of all the key nutrients that are in that particular food item. The main macronutrients will always be included: carbohydrates, protein, fats and fibre.
When it comes to looking at the amount of fats in the food, you want to pay more attention to the saturated and trans fat, rather than the amount of total fats. Not all fats are bad, some of them are good for your health. You want to avoid trans fat as much as possible. It is harmful to your heart health and can increase the risk of heart disease. Moreover, when you look at the nutrition facts for food labels and read that there is either no trans fat or 0g but mentions that there is “partially hydrogenated oil” in the ingredients list. It means that this particular food contains some trans fat but it is less than 0.5g per serving. Look out if you are eating more than one serving size.
Simultaneously when looking at sugars in the food, this includes both natural and added sugars. You want to avoid added sugars as much as possible. These sugars don’t have any nutritional value and used during preparation and processing of the food. Consuming too much added sugars can lead to heart disease and type 2 diabetes. In sum, you want to limit the amount of added sugars, trans fat and sodium that you consume.
Serving Sizes
Something that I learnt early on in my fitness journey is that you don’t have to eat the full serving size on the packaging. If you want to eat less than the serving size or more, you can. You have free will. However understanding how to read the nutrition facts for food labels will assist you with making decisions for your health. For example, if you want to eat pasta because it is high in carbs and it will make eating in a surplus easier, do it. However if you want to increase the fibre, lower the saturated and trans fat in that serving, opt for eating a healthier variation. This can include whole wheat pasta or red lentil pasta. In short, make the serving sizes work for your goals and also your health.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post! I hope that it was insightful and that you feel more confident knowing more about the food products that you are buying and consuming. Make sure to hit that subscribe button to join the community and never miss out on a post. Find me on Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok for more powerlifting and wellness content.
Until next time,
Folakemi
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