How To Read Food Labels

In room five about two weeks ago a lady came in from Christchurch to talk to our class about food and how to read food labels. Food labels is a great skill to learn and i think it can help tons of people to eat heartily. Here is my explanation    

 Reading Food Labels By Hunter

 Reading food labels is an important skill to have and lots of people don't have this skill. In this explanation I will teach you how to read food labels properly. What are food labels? Food labels tell you how healthy the food is. There is a specific column to look at and that is per one hundred grams columns as shown here.

This is the only column that we look at or that matters. The food has five different main categories: energy,fat,sugar,sodium and dietary fibre. But however we don’t pay much attention to the energy the other four are the ones that we focus on. For a food to be considered healthy it must have less than 10 grams of fat,less than 10 grams of sugar,more than 5 grams for the dietary fibre and less than 400mg for the sodium. If it has more or less than it is supposed to then it is considered an occasional food. The dietary fibre doesn't fully matter, dietary fibre helps out your digestive system. But now that you know the requirements for the food to be healthy or occasional. What you didn't know about the foods you eat. I am going to tell you about the cereal and muesli bars that you thought were healthy that aren't.

Now you may be thinking you're crazy fruit loops are soooo healthy. But have a look at the column all the way to the right that is the per one hundred grams column that we looked at before. Now I want you to have a little look back and look at the requirements for the food to be considered healthy. So if you had a look back the requirements they were less than 10 grams of fat, less than 10 grams of sugar, more than 5 grams of dietary fibre and less than 400mgs of sodium. If you look at the fruit loops it has less dietary fibre than it should and more sugar so this would be considered an occasional food. Now let's look at something a bit healthier. 

Have a look at the last column. Fat is ok, sugar is good, dietary fibre is good and so is sodium. So this is a healthy food so you can eat this every day. In conclusion, I think that reading food labels is a good thing to know how to do and I personally think everyone should know how to read them to have a healthier life. Because I know that a lot of people are eating foods that are advertised on TV and they say they are healthy but aren’t. Let's have a look at this muesli snack. 

 That may be a bit hard to read but pay attention to the bottom left corner. The sugar is way too high and the dietary fibre is too low. So there you go you thought they were so healthy but you were fooled. So all it takes is to read the back or front of a food item like chips and then you can determine if you should be having this food every day or occasionally. How do you feel about this simple thing that can make you eat healthier?