Understanding food labels

Understanding Food Labels

Shopping can be a nightmare at the best of times, all those tempting treats trying to make you feel better about eating them with their claims of being “low fat” or a “healthy choice” but not all are as innocent as they may first seem. Manufacturers have talked with food consultants and the Food Standards Agency to come up with the Traffic Light labelling system to try and make things a lot simpler.

The idea of the new labelling system is so that you can see at a glance the “healthiness” of the product you want to buy. It concentrates on the main ingredients of interest - fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt, which a majority of us need to monitor constantly to improve our diet.

The simplicity of this system is the secret of its success, “red lights” are high in something we should be trying to cut down in our diets and should be eaten as a treat, “amber lights” are on products that aren’t particularly high, or low on that particular nutrient and are therefore ok to eat more regularly, and “green lights” are the products low in those nutrients and are therefore considered the “healthy” choice.

This doesn’t mean you should never eat items that have “red lights” or only eat “green light” items, as most foods and drinks are a mix of the three. Ideally you should aim to choose foods with amber or green lights more often, and keep those with red lights as a treat. If something you regularly buy has a higher percentage of red lights, try to balance this out by buying other products that are green or amber for the same nutrients. The secret of success in any diet is to have all things in moderation, rather then just cutting out completely on something you really like.

It is interesting to look at the labels of things you eat regularly as something you may have considered healthy in the past may have more red lights then you might have first thought. For example, that “healthy” tuna sandwich that you have for lunch may have red lights for salt and saturated fats where as something you had perhaps avoided as “unhealthy” may have green light values for these nutrients.

The other thing to look for, as well as the colour of the light, many labels have the percentage of the recommended daily allowance, or number of grams of that particular nutrient on it, so items with red lights will not necessarily contain the same amount per serving. This helps you decide how “naughty” you want to be, allowing you to chose an item that may be a red light but is healthier then the one on the shelf next to it.

If you are looking for more information on food labelling then The Food Standards Agency website can help.

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