Guideline Daily Amounts - Front Of Pack Labelling

Some supermarkets have opted to use Guideline Daily Amounts rather than the coloured  traffic light scheme, other supermarkets use the traffic light scheme in combination with Guideline Daily Amounts.  

What are Guideline Daily Amounts?

GDAs stands for Guideline Daily Allowance and are a guide to how much energy and key nutrients the average healthy person needs in order to have a balanced diet.  They give you a reminder of the daily recommended amounts of calories, fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt that men, women and children can consume per day. 

How to use GDA food labels?

Guideline Daily Amount food labels are split into 5 parts –  Calories and 4 nutrients:

  • Calories
  • Sugar
  • Fat
  • Saturated Fat (Saturates)
  • Salt

 The labels then show how much of that nutrient is in a specific amount of the food, usually one serving / portion.

If you are concerned about your sugar intake you can read both the amount of sugar in the food and the percentage that this contributes to your daily intake.For simplicity food manufacturers and supermarkets use the Adult Guideline Daily Amount for most food, and this is based on the GDAs for an average woman of healthy weight and average activity. For food aimed at children manufacturers and supermarkets use the GDA for an average child aged 5 – 10 years.

Overall 12 Guideline Daily Amounts have been defined, adult and child. Then both adult and child Guideline Daily Amounts have been subdivided by sex and age. The complete range is written up in Table 1.

Many people read the Guideline Daily Amounts on manufactured foods, and the information is useful.

If you are reading a packet which had Guideline Daily Amounts and you want to know if the information is accurate for you it is worth looking for the following:

  • The portion size the manufacturer using to calculate the Guideline Daily Amounts
  • Which Guideline Daily Amount is the manufacturer using – Adult or Child?

 How do you use the LabelWise list?

You can look up the Guideline Daily Amounts of manufactured food on LabelWise

Using the GDA Selector you can choose to look up Guideline Daily Amounts for an adult or a child. You can even subdivide by sex and age. For quick start instructions on using LabelWise click here.

 

 

 

 

What do you think?

What do you think of LabelWise? How useful has it been for you? Has it changed the way you shop?

We would be really interested to know what we can do to improve LabelWise for you. Please send us your thoughts to LabelWise@nutritionandwellbeing.co.uk.

LabelWise In your pocket

You can print off your LabelWise list to take to the shops with you.

For those who want to know more about Guideline Daily Amount – front of pack labelling

 

Some people find Guideline Daily Amounts confusing for 2 reasons:

1. Men, women and children all need different Guideline Daily Amounts of calories, fat, saturated fat, sugars and salt to keep health This means that you need check the package to find out which Guideline Daily Amounts have been used. For simplicity food manufacturers and supermarkets use the Adult Guideline Daily Amount for most food, and this is based on the GDAs for an average woman of healthy weight and average activity. For food aimed at children manufacturers and supermarkets use the GDA for an average child aged 5 – 10 years.

The reference value Guideline Daily Amounts for women, men and adults are in the first table below and the Guideline Daily Amounts for 5-10 year olds are in the second table

  

  

For completeness a full range of Guideline Daily Amounts for different sexes and age groups have been calculated. If you would like to find out the energy, fat, saturated fat values for all the ages you can find the information on the Food and Drink Federation or IGD websites.   

While manufacturers do aim for simplicity its worth checking what age range for the GDA is on packets of food. Occasionally manufacturers or supermarkets will use the Adult GDA for cereals that are targeted at children e.g. Coco Pops, frosted cereals etc.

2. Serving sizes are used to calculate the percentage Guideline Daily Amounts for calories, fat, saturated fat, sugars and salt. If you are using GDAs to guide you toward a healthier diet you need to make sure that you aim to keep to the serving size on the pack. If you eat a whole pack of lasagne, and the serving size is half a pack that will double the percentage of calories, fat, saturated fat, sugars and salt that you have eaten. 

You can find out more about Guideline Daily Amount front of pack labelling from the Food and Drink Federation or from IGD.

LabelWise can make Guideline Daily Amounts clear

Using LabelWise you can chose which Guideline Daily Amounts you use to calculate the percentage of calories, fat, saturated fat, sugars and salt in a food. For example, if you are women you can choose the Female Guideline Daily Amounts simply by choosing female in the GDA selector. Alternatively you can look up food that your family eats and compare it with Guideline Daily Amounts for people in your family. For example, if you all eat Asda Corn Flakes for breakfast you can select male or female to calculate how much your portion of Corn Flakes contributes to your Guideline Daily. If you then want to check out what the portion of Corn Flakes is contributing to your 14 year old son’s breakfast (assuming that you have a 14 year old son), you can use the GDA selector to find the Guideline Daily Amounts for a boy 11-14 years and calculate how much your son’s portion of Corn Flakes is contributing to his Guideline Daily Amount. If you don’t want to get that complicated you don’t have to use the GDA selector function. You can find out more about the Guideline Daily Amount selector on the instructions page.