Food Labels and Nutrition Guides

Food labels and nutrition guides are extremely important everyday texts.  They provide facts about the food we eat to help us stay healthy. 

Food labels provide nutritional information, ingredients, and potential allergy warnings.  Always check serving sizes and number of servings; sometimes manufacturers get "tricky" and make very small servings so the nutritional information doesn't look that bad. 

A good rule of thumb when checking food labels is: If you don't know what an ingredient is, it's probably not very good for you; think about skipping that food. 

Some key points to check for on nutrition guides are total calories, calories from fat, sodium, and carbohydrates - very high numbers in any of these areas can be trouble. 

Click here to view a sample of a Food label or a restaurant nutrition guide.