We love the world of fresh foods and prefer them to anything in a package, yet our kitchen shelves are stocked with boxes, bottles, and convenient cans. Each package has a food label, and every label holds a treasury information to guide our choices between products. We can read food labels to determine the appropriateness of every product for our particular health concerns (more or less sodium, as an example) or to see if a product suits our taste (more or less sugar).
HERE'S THE GOOD NEWS: reading labels is exciting. We make discoveries when we read. True, some make us sigh with discouragement at the surprising contents that lie within, but others delight us and make us feel good about what we're eating. Either way, we become informed.
For a consumer, the two essential elements on a food product label are 1) the list of ingredients, and 2) the nutrition facts panel. The nutrition facts panel frequently contains a footnote with Daily Values based on 2,000 or 2,500 calorie per day diets. This is found on larger packages. These are regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration. They are there to protect consumers by helping them get better nutrition information and to avoid false or misleading heath claims. While carefully reading those labels helps our nutritional choices, we never forget that that fresh and home-made is always better and usually tastier.
Elements of a Food Label
1 - List of Ingredients
This can be an eye-opening part of a label. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires that the ingredients in any product be listed according to weight in descending order, from most to least. You will recognize many of the ingredients, but the list includes many polysyllabic, unpronounceable words. These forbidding tongue-twisters are additives that preserve the food, give it flavor, substitute a chemical for a natural sugar. Do we know which may be suspected as being cancer-forming? Studies are conducted all the time, often in contradiction of each other. When considering additives, less is better.
Among the additives are those that provide either "natural" or "artificial" flavors. In Fast Food Nation, author Eric Schlosser tells us, "The similarities between these two broad categories are far more significant than the differences. Both are man-made additives that give most processed food most of its taste." We highly recommend this book for those who want additional information about processed food.
Let us invent a fellow named Paolo who has recently arrived from Rome, has a new and difficult job in the U.S. and would like to find a few products to make cooking easier. His eye spots a bottle of salad dressing labeled "Italian Style." Thinking that this will be the same as the simple,olive oil and vinegar dressing that he was raised on, Paolo's hand reaches eagerly for the bottle.
Paolo is disappointed when he tastes the dressing. Had he read the label rather than assume he was buying pre-mixed oil and vinegar, he would have learned this this dressing was composed of 'vegetable' oil (not necessarily from the tasty olive), vinegar, sugar and herbs. Sugar? To Paolo, sugar does not belong in dressing. He does not know that American manufacturers have responded to the American taste for sweetness by putting sweeteners in their dressing. Paolo tosses the bottle away, and has wasted his money.
This may be a matter of taste, but what if Paolo had diabetes and was trying to limit the amount of sweeteners that went into his body? More than taste, this list of ingredients would have shown him that this was an item he might do without if he wanted to optimize his diet for health concerns. There goes Paolo - throwing away his money again, when all he had to do was read the label.
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