Food Labels & Nutrition Info

Lot of frozen/canned options are available in the market for various things. What labels do you read when buying things like cheese, butter, crackers, pasta sauces, juices, purees etc?

8 Comments:

  1. OK. I will bite. I dont read the nutrition info at all. As long as I like the contents of any food packaging and the ingredients does not contain “Egg” I will buy it.

    Obviously you are reading more Nutrition Info then me. So what is it that we should be reading????

  2. I check for sodium, sugar content in the nutrition label. Most of the canned food has lot of sodium – e.g v8 vegetable juice, tomato puree, pasta sauces etc. Ofcourse read ingredients as well. But sometimes from the ingredients we may not know what is the source of that such as ‘natural color’ in the ingredient list – does anyone know where it comes from?

  3. For Kairavi’s cereal I check sugar content. Like Fruity Cheerios has 13g where as similar styled colorful Trix has 9gm. Have also noticed that some of the kids cereals has much more (20+) sugar level then adult ones.

  4. I guess ideally “Total Fat” should be low, Cholestrol should be low, Sodium should be ???, Cabohydrate should be medium?, Protein should be high?

  5. We avoid buying things that has hydrogenated oils. That’s one of the reason I like TJ’s as they carry lot of items with natural ingredients.

    NYC is banning its restaurants from using transfats intheir food.

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16051436/

    Sanjay’s rule of thumb is if there are more than 7-8 ingredients, specially the ones that are hard to read, then the item should be avoided if possible.

  6. Sodium content – this rules out most prepared frozen foods as well as canned foods.

    Dairy products – watch out for rennet – TJ’s carries cheeses without rennet

    Polysaturated vs monosaturated fats – latter is better I like Sanjay’s rule of thumb on the number of ingredients 🙂

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  8. Apart from fat content and type (saturated, mono, poly, trans, etc) I look at calories from fat vs total calories. This ratio should not be more than 30%. Sugar and protein content are usually under consideration as well.

    well, that’s all I check for a guilt free consumption of potato chips. 🙂

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