Understanding food labels

Whatever your health goals, reading and understanding food labels can help you achieve them. For example, understanding your fat and salt intake can help to improve your heart health, and being mindful of your energy intake will support with weight loss, maintenance or gain.

Traffic light labels

The traffic light labels on the front of a packet show you whether the product has low (green), medium (amber) or high (red) amounts of energy, fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt. They can be a very useful tool for seeing how healthy or unhealthy something is and quickly comparing products at a glance. The general advice is to go for green, occasionally amber, and red only occasionally.

What is considered low, medium or high?

Per 100g of food – Used when suggested portion size is greater than 100g

This table shows how much sugar, fat, saturated fat, and salt within a product is classed as low, medium, or high. Try to consider how often you are having foods in the red category. Just because fat is in red, take a moment to consider the source of the fat. Is it high in healthier fats? For example, both mackerel and croissants will be red for fat; however, the mackerel will be high in polyunsaturated fats, whereas the croissant will be high in saturated fats. Sugars refer to the amount of sugar in a product, not the total carbohydrate content. A packet of pasta will be low in sugar; all carbohydrates are broken down into sugars and will therefore have an impact on your blood glucose levels. The traffic light system only shows the free sugar content of an item (i.e., the ‘of which sugars’), but the nutritional values table also shows us the total carbohydrate value, which includes all starchy carbohydrates as well. Understanding the value of total carbohydrates can help manage the risk of Type 2 diabetes, as the quantity of carbohydrates in your diet plays a key role in blood glucose levels. Also, remember to consider the protein and fibre content of the items, both of which help to control the rate at which sugar is absorbed into the blood, by impacting the glycaemic index of the meal.

Nutritional values table

This label contains a lot of information that can be used to help us make informed decisions about a product. The nutritional values table tells us the amount of energy (expressed in kJ and kcal), fat, saturated fat, carbohydrate, sugars, fibre, protein and salt. All nutrition information is provided per 100g or 100ml as well as sometimes per serving. The nutrition information per 100g/100ml helps us to make a comparison between the same weight of products. When choosing between two different loaves of bread, it would be useful to compare the energy, carbohydrate, fibre and salt content per 100g to get a sense of which product may be a better choice. However, because one bread could be denser or have bigger slices than another, we can use the per portion values to make a like for like comparison on the quantity we are more likely to have.

Be aware of what the manufacture suggests is a portion size as it might be different from the portion you would choose.