Understanding food labels can really help when looking to eat a healthy diet. However the very information put on foods to assist us can sometimes lead to even more confusion.
It can also be very time consuming when you start as you can spend a lot of time looking at the small tables of information. It is well worth investing some time n this though as once you have got to know the basics it then becomes easier to just be able to compare similar products and quickly know which is the better choice.
The other thing to keep in mind too is that eating healthily does not have to be expensive. Often the cheaper food items in supermarkets can be the best choices.
If you only take on board one thing as far as food labels is concerned it is that do not be misled by the amount of sugar in a food. It is the total amount of carbohydrate that determines the blood glucose not the amount of sugar.
Some items labelled no added sugar can actually have more carbohydrate in them than the alternate items they are aiming to replace. The worst offenders with this are sweet biscuits labelled sugar free and sweets and chocolate labelled sugar free.
In the Dwell programme we do a whole session on labelling as it is a complex subject.