Reading Food Product Labels 2 - Ingredient Lists

Hello all! Hope you're all doing great, feeling happy and not fed up about being excessively fed up over the holidays (GEDDIT? Fed up? By your relatives?? With food??? And prying questions????). I digress. Welcome back to my website, where I aim to share some of my sometimes excessive geekery with you the reader!

Today's article will be a continuation of my previous article on How to Read Food Labels Part 1 (link to the article in case you missed it!), where we will learn how to read Ingredients Lists.

Knowing how to read ingredients lists is a crucial skill as it allows one to know (or at least have the ability to find out) exactly what goes into whatever you eat/drink. This skill is critical for the following reasons:

• You may want to avoid allergens in the food/drinks you consume.

• You want to know if a food/drink actually contains what is advertised, and if so, roughly how much compared to other ingredients.

• You want to make healthy/ethical/religious choices regarding what you consume.

I see you're asking the right questions!

The benefits of possessing this key skill are manifold, and too numerous to be listed here. So, without exhausting your depressingly/comically low attention span (I know mine is!) any further, please read on for how you might acquire such power.

Has this ever happened to you?

It’s New Year’s Day.

You’ve sworn for the tenth consecutive year that you’re going to reduce your sugar intake.

You embark on your pilgrimage to the supermarket/online store to stock up on healthy foods to rid your conscience of that fifth beer you had the night before during the countdown festivities.

#NewYearNewMe right?

Let’s say you start with cereal, the quintessential breakfast for champions.

You waltz toward the cereal aisle of your local store, on an epic moral crusade against excess calories. There’s a problem, though. You have NO IDEA how to choose a breakfast cereal concordant with your freshly adopted anti-sugar tendencies.

You’ve read my previous article about the importance of food labels, so like the good reader who applies what they have learnt, you inspect the label to try and glean some information about what it is you are buying. Using sugar as an example, this article will show you how you can quickly skim through an ingredients list like a pro and weed out faux-healthy choices (the tips in this article are quite versatile and apply to whatever ingredients you are looking out for).

Just what goes into your “Honey Coated Wheat and Corn Puffs Breakfast Cereal” (Honey Stars)?

In the event that food labels are unclear/are trying to hide behind some fancy marketing spiel (imagine some utterly helpful statement like PREMIUM ALL NATURAL GLUTEN-FREE NEVER TESTED ON ANIMALS VEGAN CEREAL), a quick foray into the ingredients list would help you cut through all the meaningless fluff. So, in the New Year’s Day shopping scenario, let’s break down how you would determine how to choose the best low-sugar cereal.

How Should You Read Ingredients Lists?

Here's how ingredients lists work in general (this is true in Singapore and in most countries around the world):

• Ingredients are listed in descending order according to weight

• Additives, whether natural or artificial, should be listed. These include flavourings, colourings and artificial sweeteners (more about these in a separate future article).

• Ingredients of ingredients should be listed (eg ingredients of soy sauce that go into a packaged stew).

• Allergens should be declared.

These are the most basic rules that ingredients lists should follow. Knowing these rules is just the tip of the iceberg, though. Practically, you would want to do the following when scanning for a low-sugar cereal.

DO:

• Be curious and Google whatever ingredients you are unsure of (you’re eating this stuff, remember?)

• Try to choose foods with as few ingredients as possible. Fewer ingredients tend to mean that the food is minimally processed and are likely healthier.

• Ensure that you scan for potential allergens (they should be listed at the end of ingredients lists, or within the list itself)

• Ensure that you identify the number of times an ingredient can appear in different guises. Sometimes, sneaky manufacturers can camouflage sugars under a myriad of names such as:

1) Sugar

2) High Fructose Corn Syrup

3) Molasses

4) Concentrated [Insert fruit like grape/apple] Juice

5) Maltodextrin (not technically a sugar, but we can treat it as such)

6) Anything that ends with -ose (Glucose, fructose, lactose, maltose, etc)

7) EVAPORATED CANE JUICE (I hate this the MOST; just how dumb do they think we ARE??!!1111)

These can all be added by food manufacturers in varying proportions, and even though they are listed separately, will add up to one tremendous sugar bomb. How many types of sugar can you see in the ingredients list below?

Sugars in their guises.

Copyright: Husky Nutrition at UConn Health

https://www.snap4ct.org/added-sugar.html

DON’T:

• Automatically assume that whatever sounds chemical-ey is bad for you. Sodium Chloride is just geek-speak for plain old table salt and Potassium Chloride is a common low-sodium substitute for conventional salt. (See above ingredients list for some vitamins that go by their full geeky names as well)

• Believe the product labels at the first glance (that “wholesome whole grain breakfast crunch supreme” may actually contain almost as much/more sugar than grain!)

• Obsess over anything and everything in the ingredients list. If it’s a treat, it’s a treat! Please don’t ask the poor cashier of your local store why that tub of ice cream has 15 different types of sugars in it (if you do, tell them you learnt how to read ingredients lists here from me!)

What then, would a low-sugar cereal option look like in the ingredients list? Compare the list below with the list above, and draw your conclusions!

We see that from the list above, all ingredients are listed and "CONTAINS WHEAT" is displayed as an allergen warning prominently below the main list in BIG BLACK BOLD LETTERS. The word "sugar" is nowhere to be seen in the list. This indicates that the dried blueberries are simply dried blueberries, Captain Obvious! (It really means that no additional sugar is added to the fruit in the process of drying).

There you have it! This has been a short, hopefully pain-free primer of how you might read ingredients lists on your groceries. Now you have no excuse to feign ignorance while scarfing down that extra large bowl of Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs (gimme a shoutout if you get that cereal reference!!)

The world of food knowledge is wide and deep, and for the purposes of this article, I have limited my ingredients analysis to only sugar. The rules apply in general to all types of ingredients, be it fats, proteins, carbs, or vitamins and minerals (PSST, and cosmetics, too!). If you were to be looking for a cereal option that is high in protein, you would be applying the same rules and looking for ingredients lists with protein-containing ingredients higher up in the list.

Up next, stay tuned for an article on macronutrients (fats, proteins and carbohydrates), and how they might appear with different names in an ingredients list!

Till then, stay hungry, stay curious!

Calvin.

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