How to read a food label
A 5 step guide
When you are faced with reading food labels, and looking at them in detail, they can seem quite daunting but it can also be simple – here’s your 5 step guide - how to read food labels.
Step 1 – Ignore nutrition claims
First ignore any big nutrition claims that jump out on the front of the packet / tin and grab your attention
These claims will be accurate but we’ll come back to that.
Step 2 – Begin by reading the list of ingredients
Begin with reading the list of ingredients
Ingredients list provides a lot of useful information about what’s in your food. To begin, with a few exceptions, all pre-packed foods must be labelled with their ingredients listed in descending order of their weight.
If an ingredient is mentioned in the name of a food, such as chicken in ‘chicken pie’, or is shown on the label, the amount of that ingredient contained in the food must be given as a percentage. This allows you to compare similar products.
Single ingredient foods, for example cheese, sugar and butter, do not need to give a list of ingredients. Neither do alcoholic drinks (above 1.2% vol.).
Where an ingredient is made up of several other ingredients, all the individual ingredients, with a few exceptions, must be given on the label – for example, the ingredients of mayonnaise used in a potato salad.
The ingredients list is also where you’ll find the E numbers in a manufactured food, they aren’t necessarily listed as E numbers and they aren’t necessarily ‘bad’.
Step 3 – Read the nutrition label (if it’s available)
When you’ve read the ingredients list you’ll have a good idea what is in your food. Next you might want to look at the nutritional labelling. As we thought you’d be very interested in this we’ve provided a separate page on nutrition labelling
Step 4 – Read the Traffic Light and Guideline Daily Amount labelling
The food may also have Traffic Light Labelling or Guideline Daily Amounts, again we’ve provided separate pages with info on these. Just remember when you are reading the Guideline Daily Amounts that these are based on the manufacturers portion size, not necessarily your portion size.
Step 5 – Now read the nutrition claims!
Finally you can come back to the front of the packet with those attention grabbling nutrition claims. These will be accurate but it’s important to understand them alongside all the other information about a food. Take for example yoghurt which could claim to low in fat, but it might also be high sugar. You will have read the ingredients list and will understand this.
Just as an aside, nutrition claims on manufactured foods are very well controlled under strict guidance in the UK.
You’ll find lots of other information on some, if not all, food packaging. The sorts of information you might find are:
Other information on the food label
Health claims
- Claims about how a food can improve your health – health claims are also strictly controlled in the UK and so are accurate.
Manufacturers can make health claim about one ingredient in a food e.g. the fat in the fat in yogurt, and omit to provide health information about other ingredients, like the sugar.
You may also find allergen information on packaging.
Allergens
There are also 14 allergens that must be lists on a label if the food contains them.
The 14 foods are:
- celery
- cereals containing gluten (wheat, barley, rye and oats)
- crustaceans (such as lobster and crab)
- eggs
- fish
- lupin
- milk
- molluscs (such as mussels and oysters)
- mustard
- nuts (such as almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, Brazil nuts, cashews, pecans, pistachios and macadamia nuts)
- peanuts
- sesame seeds
- soybeans
- sulphur dioxide and sulphites (preservatives used in some foods and drinks) at levels above 10mg per kg or per litre
Of course there will also be information about country of origin, best before date, as this information doesn’t relate directly to nutrition we’ve not included it here, but if you want to find out more information on food labels you can visit the Food Standards Agency’s Eatwell website.
