Reading a nutrition label in 30 seconds
Our health and nutrition are literally in our hands. There is no shortcut—cook your own food, know what’s going into your meal, and read nutrition labels. Many people skip the last one, but it is literally the first step in taking control of your diet.
Nutrition labels look intimidating because they show you everything. But you don’t need everything. You need a scan order and a couple of rules of thumb.
Start at the top: serving size
This is the number that makes every other number make sense, and it’s the one people skip most. Everything below it—the calories, the sugar, the sodium—describes one serving, not the whole package.
The catch is that a serving is rarely the whole thing. A bag of chips might list three servings. A “single” muffin might count as two. If the label says 230 calories and you eat the whole container of three, that’s 690. Glance at the serving size and the “servings per container” line first, and mentally multiply if you plan to eat more than one.
Then calories—but in context
Calories tell you how much energy is in one serving. There’s no magic “good” or “bad” number—it depends on the food and how it fits your day. A handful of nuts is calorie-dense and genuinely good for you. A large soda is calorie-dense and mostly sugar.
So don’t chase the lowest number. Remember that calories are per serving, and very rarely the entire package. This is where many people accidentally eat more calories than they think they are eating.
Macros
Macros are the next most important thing to look at. These are your carbohydrates, protein, and fat. This is how you can tell what’s low-carb, high-protein, or low-fat. High-protein foods have a higher protein content compared to carbohydrates. Something like chicharon will—surprise, surprise—be low-carb, higher-protein, and higher-fat. Those who are watching their macros focus on these three nutrients.
For most people, three nutrients are worth a quick look because it’s easy to get more than you realize:
• Saturated fat: linked to heart health; worth keeping moderate
• Sodium: hides in bread, sauces, and snacks far more than in the salt shaker
• Added sugars: This line is your friend. It separates sugar that was added during processing from sugar that occurs naturally (like in fruit or plain dairy). It’s one of the most useful numbers on the whole label.
Other nutrients such as fiber, vitamins, and minerals are important to take note of, too. Fiber keeps you full and helps digestion. Vitamins and minerals such as potassium, calcium, iron, and vitamin D are now listed at the bottom. Higher numbers here are a point in the food’s favor.
The one rule that ties it together: 5 and 20
To the right of most nutrients is a % Daily Value, or how much one serving contributes to a typical day. You don’t need to do math on it. Just remember two numbers:
• Five percent or less means the food is low in that nutrient
• 20 percent or more means it’s high
So you want low percentages next to sodium, saturated fat, and added sugars, and high percentages next to fiber, potassium, calcium, and the rest. That single rule replaces most of the arithmetic people think they’re supposed to do.
The ingredients list
The ingredients list is something many people neglect. However, I would say this is as important as the calories and macros. What you eat is just as important as how much you are eating. The ingredients list is where you can see how pure food is.
Healthy whole foods will have only a handful of ingredients, consisting of the main product, then spices and other whole foods. Once you see starches, gums, maltodextrin—remember: These are cheap fillers that add to the bulk of your food.
In Filipino packaged food, sugars hidden under other names are the biggest culprit—and there are over 50 of them! Those are usually words that end in “ose” and anything that has syrup, nectar, or malt.
The “-ose” family, usually pure sugars, includes sucrose, glucose, fructose, dextrose, maltose, lactose, galactose, trehalose, crystalline fructose, and anhydrous dextrose.
Syrups
These include high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), corn syrup, corn syrup solids, brown rice syrup, rice syrup, malt syrup, maple syrup, golden syrup, cane syrup, carob syrup, tapioca syrup, and sorghum syrup.
Watch out for these, as packaged food is full of them. Two things that are not sugar (though often confused): sugar alcohols (those that end in “-ol”—sorbitol, xylitol, erythritol, maltitol—and are listed separately on labels) and high-intensity sweeteners like aspartame, sucralose, and stevia.
The trick manufacturers use: Split sweeteners across several of these names so no single “sugar” lands high on the ingredients list even though the combined total might be the largest ingredient.
From most to least
Ingredients are listed by weight, most to least. So whatever’s first is what there’s the most of. If sugar (or one of its aliases) shows up near the top, that tells you something the front of the box won’t.
And there are a lot of aliases—cane juice, corn syrup, dextrose, maltose, agave, fruit juice concentrate. They’re all sugar wearing different outfits. Spot a few of them scattered through a short list, and you’ve got a sweeter product than it looks.
Your nutrition label cheat sheet
• Serving size — and how many servings you’ll actually eat
• Calories — noted, per serving, in context
• Limit these — saturated fat, sodium, added sugars
• Get enough of these — fiber, protein, key vitamins and minerals
• Use the 5/20 rule — low is five percent, high is 20 percent
• Check the sugars and other ingredients — if you can’t say it, it’s not natural
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