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FOOD
LABELS!
Food
labels help you make smart decisions about what you eat. They also make good
reading and math practice.
Food
stores are filled with delicious things to...read. Labels on food have become
such a part of our lives that we may not even notice them. But reading food
labels can change your life.
What's
in the food you are eating? The food label tells you. The amounts of each of the
ingredients in a food are listed in order—from most to least.
Which
lemonade is more healthful? Yummy Lemonade is made with sugar, water, and lemon
concentrate. Good Lemonade is made with lemons, water, and artificial sweetener.
The Good brand may not be as yummy as Yummy. But, suppose you have diabetes and
shouldn't eat sugar? The information on the label tells you what you need to
know to make a decision.
Hmm.
Should you buy real ice cream with double chocolate-chips and 30 milligrams of
cholesterol? Or should you choose marble fudge frozen yogurt with16 milligrams of cholesterol?
If your cholesterol count is too high, which should you buy? Which do you
actually buy? Now, that's a whole other story!
Here’s
a label for a typical breakfast cereal.
 YOU TRY IT
Look through your kitchen
cabinets and refrigerator, and gather three types of foods with nutritional
labels on them. Using the labels on
the packages, fill in this chart:
Name
of
Food |
Serving
Size |
First
Three (Main) Ingredients |
My
Comments Based on the Label |
| Big Eat
Cookies |
2 cookies |
bleached
enriched flour, sweet chocolate, sugar |
8 grams of
fat in 2 cookies! That's a lot! |
1.
|
|
|
|
2.
|
|
|
|
3.
|
|
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 How
Much Can a Little Mouth Eat?
Pay close attention to
the serving size on a food label. Often the listed serving size is very small.
So the salt, sugar and amount of fat and calories seem reasonable. But not many
people can stop with two pretzels or four potato chips!
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Sugar Watch
On a food label, sugars
include… |
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brown sugar
corn sweetener
corn syrup
fructose
fruit juice concentrate
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glucose (dextrose)
raw sugar syrup
high-fructose corn syrup
honey
invert sugar |
maltose
molasses
table sugar (sucrose)
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| A food is likely to be
high in sugars if one of the above items appears first or second in the
ingredients list, or if several of them are listed. |
IT'S A FACT!
In 1996, Americans spent more than $478 billion buying food to be cooked or eaten at
home. More than $268 billion was
spent on restaurant meals.
Education
Development Center, Inc. © 2001.
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