Make Healthy Meals

The nutrition labels on many foods can be quite confusing. There’s so much information on them, serving sizes, calories and so forth. Let’s go over some of the basics.

Serving size can be one of the trickiest parts. It’s supposed to be the amount you would eat as a single serving, but this can be a bit deceptive. A can of condensed soup in my cabinet, for example, lists itself as containing about 2.5 servings. I don’t know many people who will eat it just that way, so you have to think about what you’re really getting from foods like that as you consider what is in the food you are eating.

When you compare products, make sure the serving size is the same. Things are better than they used to be, but sometimes you will see foods claiming absurdly small serving sizes. These may be what you ought to eat according to the food pyramid, but they may bear no relation to how you really eat them.

Calories are something most people have at least heard of these days. If you want to lose weight, you’re probably trying to cut calories. You might be surprised at how many calories some prepared foods have.

% Daily Value tells you how much of the recommended daily value of each nutrient the food has. This is based on a 2000 calorie diet, so if you’re counting calories the percentage may not be exactly right for you, but it does give you an idea as to how much of a given nutrient is present.

The most important values are listed in the main section, with minor nutrients listed below. The main section includes information on fat, saturated fat, sodium and cholesterol. The lower section gets into the various vitamins, such as iron and vitamin C.

If you’ve never paid attention to nutrition labels, you may be in for a nasty shock as you look at your favorite foods. When I got my husband to start looking, he was surprised at the values reported for some of his favorites. He was starting to watch his cholesterol level, and getting him to understand that the fat content mattered as well as the cholesterol took some work, but I think it was worth it.

Share your thoughts on this post, recipe ideas or anything else relevant.