How to read food labels?

(image source – iherb.com)

As a beauty product consumer, i always read labels. Nooo not the calorie content! :p I always read the ingredients and look out for the expiry date.

You see, there is a certain standard that food manufacturing companies must abide and one of them is printing accurate ingredients. There are other regulations but we’re only going to touch on food labels today. 🙂

1) Ingredients are labelled in descending order. If water makes up the most in the canned soup, then you’ll see Water first in the list. If the last word you see is Salt, then it means the salt content is the least.

2) Certain foods are allowed to be labelled under a Parent category. For example, lobsters, prawns and crabs can be printed as Crustaceans. Same goes to Fish Products category which contains scallops, oysters and clams. Other Parent and Child category can be found here:

Dairy Product – milk, butter, cream, cheese, casein, yogurt

Nuts – almond, hazelnut, cashew nut, macadamia nut, brazil nut

Cereal – wheat, rye, barley, oats

3) Companies are required to print the Expiry Date as well. You can find it on the bottle cap, underneath the carton, at the side etc. There is no standard as to where they should print it, so long as it’s printed!

My husband has a theory that he explained to me that day:

Expiry date on our carton of milk showed a certain date. Now, that carton of milk was already opened and left in the fridge for almost a week. He wanted to throw it away but i said, we have till next week! He then explained, that expiry date is true when you keep it sealed. Now that you’ve broken the seal, it’s invalid. You should have consumed it within 3 days! Ooohhhhh… So that’s what expiry dates are all about!

Some nutritional supplement manufacturers DO NOT label everything in the list. It is your responsibility to check before making purchase. Like i have mentioned in my previous posts, branded supplements don’t care about their consumers. They make one product to suit everyone to make MONEY.

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