Thursday, January 28th 2010

By Bahram Dideban

BAHRAM DIDEBAN

MANAGING EDITOR

Although they’re a common sight, Nutrition Facts tables were not actually required on foods until just a few years ago. Health Canada reports that nutrition labeling—and its regulations which were introduced in 2003, have only recently become mandatory—since Dec. 12, 2007.

This may be a little hard to believe considering how much depends on the statistics in those little tables but it also means that you might not be as far behind in the diet race as you think. This is a great chance to get ahead of the curve, so to help you out, here’s a quick guide to getting the most from your food labels.

The Nutrition Facts table, which is now present on the back of all foods—with a few exceptions—is basically a list of the nutritional content of your food. It contains information about the amount of calories and 13 other nutrients including saturated and trans fats, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrates (fibre and sugars), proteins, Vitamins A and C, and calcium and iron that your food contains. Each of these is listed in the same spot in all labels to make them easy to compare. Don’t be scared by your first look at the back; all those statistics might seem daunting but they’re actually much easier to decipher than you think.

The first thing you should do is look at the amount of food the nutrition table is based on. The specific amount of food is always listed below the “Nutrition Facts” title. For example, a bag of brown bread may have a nutrition label with “Per 2 slices (30g)” listed on it. This means that the information in the table is based on two slices of bread, which together weigh 30 grams. Compare this listed amount to how much you actually eat.

Next, and this step might seem strange, but skip the calorie content listing. There are a couple of reasons why you should do this. First, calories are just a measure of energy content and so they can come from the digestion of practically anything; sugars, fats or even proteins. This makes calorie content a very poor representation of the health level of the food. Second, the number of calories that each person requires varies considerably depending on age, gender, body size and activity level. Even in the table, the calorie content isn’t listed with a per cent sign recommending how much you should eat in a day. This brings us to the next step.

Take a look at the figures on the right. These are written in per cent values based on a recommended daily intake. So, if two slices of bread are listed as two per cent fat, then they have two per cent of the total amount of fat you should be eating each day. In other words, you could eat 50 slices of bread and not go over your limit for fat. Obviously, you wouldn’t do that since your diet would be horribly unbalanced but the theory is there. So, how do you use these values?

A complicated way is to track all your food throughout the day and add the values up at night. A simpler way is to think of the total amount of food you eat in a day as 100 per cent. Then, think that you’re going to eat 3 times a day, so for each meal you can eat around 30 per cent. You can easily add up the percentages in your meal to see if you’re eating more than your allowance.

Based on the ‘30 per cent rule’ you’ll find some startling things on the back of some foods. For example, half a bag of Blockbuster popcorn can have as much as 70 per cent of your daily intake of fat! A single cup of noodles can have a sodium content as high as 60 per cent, and a single burger patty can be as high as 80 per cent of daily intake of fat. But, compared to red meat, chicken burgers are usually around 15 per cent, so you could eat 6 chicken burgers for every beef burger that you eat and still get the same amount of protein.

Don’t make the process too complicated; just adjust it a little when you realize you’re over doing it. And remember to leave room for snacks.

Tags: fitness, pumping iron