Nutrition labels or often called food label can help you to choose between products and keep a check on the amount of ingredients that made the foods you’re eating.

Most pre-packed foods have a nutrition label on the back or side of the packaging. Whereas some supermarkets and food manufacturers also display nutritional information on the front of packages. This is useful to compare the difference between a few food products at a glance.

How the label works? Look for the 5 key points on the label

1. Energy in kilojoules (kJ) and kilocalories (kcal), we normally call it calories. The energy tells you how much energy is in the product. In average, women needs around 2,000 kcal a day and men needs around 2,500 kcal.

2. Saturates in other word fat. This section tells you about the amount of fat in the product.

3. Sodium/ Salt it is recommended that adults shouldn’t eat more salt than the recommended maximum of 6g a day. If constantly eating too much salt it can increase the risk of high blood pressure.

4. Sugar is not often listed in the label as ‘sugar’. Also look for words such as glucose, honey, hydrolysed starch, syrup and invert sugar.

5. Serving/ portions size it is a label on the pack saying the manufacturer’s recommendation for one portion of the product. Some product also shows the amount of each nutrient in 100g of the product. Even if the food looks healthy, if you eat more than the portion amount, you end up eating more calories, fat, salt, sugar than you realise.

You can use nutrition labels to help you choose a more balanced diet. If you want to improve your diet, it is important to get into the habit of checking the label.

Colour coding (red, amber and green)

Colour coding the nutritional information tells you at a glance if the food has high, medium or low amount of fat, saturated fat, sugars and salt.

In short: red = high, amber = medium and green = low.

Therefore the more green on the label the healthier the food is. If there are many reds on the label, these are the food you should cut down on or only eat a small amount at a time.

After all, to make your life easier I discovered a Food Scanner app, that tells you all the nutrition information of a product and it suggests some healthier options in one scan. Go and download it now by clicking the icon below.