A beginner’s guide to reading nutrition labels
December 4, 2021




You go to a grocery store and are overwhelmed by the amount of products available to you. How do you pick the healthy options? What should you look for when reading a nutrition label? Do you even glance at the nutrition label? It depends on your goals really. Company’s invest thousands of dollars into their marketing so there’s a high chance the packaging is deceiving and portrayed as a healthy option. Phrases to look out for include: “high fiber”, “superfood”, “low sodium”, and “heart healthy”. You’ll notice a lot of cereal boxes with these phrases.
So what should you look out for while picking up groceries? If your goal is to simply be healthy with no intention of weight loss or muscle gain, I’d recommend highly focusing on the ingredients list. The smaller the ingredients list, the better. Although many health influencers preach about avoiding ingredients and “chemicals” that you can’t pronounce, most of the added ingredients that are hard to pronounce are vitamins and minerals enriched or fortified into the products. If you’re fully plant-based, those added nutrients in the fortified products are crucial to avoid deficiencies, especially if you’re not taking supplements. A few ingredients to avoid, however are things like high fructose corn syrup, palm oil, vegetable oils, artificial food coloring, MSG, and limit artificial sweeteners.
Tip: The ingredients list goes in order, starting from the ingredient used in highest volume.
This is a part of a nutrition label found on an almond milk bottle for example. The serving size is 1 cup, meaning 1 cup of this almond milk is 70 calories. The container itself holds 4 servings, meaning the entire bottle of almond milk would be 280 calories. You’d want to stay within the recommended serving size for a weight loss goal.
If your intentions are muscle gain, your main focus should be the protein content. 1 gram of protein is recommended per body weight in pounds. For muscle maintenance, a healthy amount of protein to consume is 0.8 grams per pound. If a product contains over 20g of protein per serving, it’s considered a good source of protein.
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Other things to look out for:
Lastly, it’s important to look out for the fiber content in a packaged product. In order to find out if a product is a good source of fiber, divide the total carbs by the dietary fiber. If the answer is 5 or less, the fiber content is great! I know you’re thinking ugh I don’t want to do math at the grocery store, but you’ll get the hang of it. Plus I always share my favorite products on my Instagram so follow me there! 🙂 Here’s an example of my favorite brand of toast, Ezekiel bread.
I know this information might seem overwhelming at first, but I promise once you get used to reading nutrition labels and knowing what to look for, your diet will improve dramatically. Hope this helped!
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