When starting a healthy lifestyle, you may find yourself reaching for foods and reading their nutrition labels. While this is a good way to figure out if something deserves to be on your plate, nutrition labels are full of lots of information, and understanding what they mean can be confusing. Here’s how to read them so you know which foods to eat.
Serving Size
It’s important to know that the information listed on nutrition labels refers to the food’s serving size. This number is usually in cups or pieces and you’ll also be able to see how many servings are in the package. The serving size is a good baseline to know how much you should be eating of the food.
Calories
We tend to overly focus on calories, when in actuality, they just measure how much energy you’ll get from a serving of food. Calories have little to do with how healthy a food is.
Nutrients
The label will list the macro and micronutrients in an item which includes fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrates, dietary fiber, added sugars, total sugars, protein, vitamin D, calcium, iron, and potassium. Next to the nutrients you’ll see Daily Value (%DV), which is the percentage of the nutrient in one serving.
