Mistakes When Reading Food Labels - Nutrition Tips - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. Food labels can be really confusing. There are actually a few things on there that are the most important things to understand. Do not worry about the rest of the little fine print stuff. The main things to know on a food label is what is the serving size, how many servings are in that container because all the rest of that information that is listed there is in relationship to that serving, not to the entire package. That is where things get a little confusing because often times the packaging is made to look like it is a single serving. There are a lot of juices out there, there are a lot of hand to mouth kind of snacky products out there that when you actually look at the number of servings inside that package there is two to five servings in there but we kind of think about it as eating the whole thing, so really pay close attention to that. The other piece is to understand that the announce of the nutrients in there often times are in relationship to a certain caloric load for the day, so for example you will see in the bottom it will will say something like Vitamin C, 25%, well that is a relationship to a 2000 calorie diet. Well, most people are not really watching calories, most people do not know what a calorie is, most people do not know how many 2000 calories are, so having some kind of a percentage of that number is essentially meaningless. Really pay attention to the ingredients. Just skip the rest of that and go down to the ingredients list, that is even more fine print, it looks like for more products. You want to be able to identify the real food in that ingredients' list. You do not want to see a whole lot of words in there that you cannot understand. If you have got to get out a dictionary to figure out what you are eating there is a problem. So generally what you will find when you go to the grocery store is if you pick one up and you cannot understand whatever is in that thing you can out it down and pick up another one on the shelf, 'Oh! I get what most of what that stuff is'. You are generally going to be better off the more you can get towards a real food. If you can shop the perimeter of your grocery store there are no labels there, makes it easy, you know why? It is real food, fruits, vegetables, dairy, meats, that is the main part of what you should be building your meals out of anyway and you do not have to worry about a food label.
