What do the labels mean

For this site, I’ll read some food labels and let you know which foods are the good stuff and which are What the UPF…!

Some UPF’s are borderline. I’ll do my best to highlight some of these as well.

But because I can’t read all the labels of every item in every supermarket, you’ll also need to read the labels for those brands you buy for your family.

So here’s how to read the labels. This section is a bit long but stick to it as it’s the key to leaving those UPF’s on the shelf.

Basically there are two areas on the packaging to look for:

What do

the food labels

mean?

1 The Ingredients

In the Ingredients list, the items are listed in order - from most used to least.

This means that the first ingredient is what the manufacturer has used the most, the second ingredient is the second most used and so on.

But when the list is long, we don’t actually know the proportions of each of the ingredients.

Sometimes the manufacturer gives the percentage of one particular ingredient and you can roughly work it out from there. But the manufacturer can often be tricky about which ingredient to give the percentage for.

The longer the list, the more ultra processed the food is.

2 The Nutrition Information

This is found mostly in a text box either on the side or the back of the pack. (It’s mostly but not always near the Ingredients list).

It has important nutrition information according to the 7 food components – energy (kilojoules/calories), protein, total fat, saturated fat, total carbohydrates, sugars and sodium.

We want to avoid high sugar, high sodium and the bad fats and look for good sources of protein, fibre and carbohydrates.

But you don't have to read it all and there are a few hacks which I will outline further on.

This Australian Government table makes it pretty clear.