Understanding Nutrition Labels
Healthy nutrition will help you improve your health as well as lose excess weight and maintain a healthy body weight. Following the guidelines for healthy nutrition is an excellent decision but eating according to the food pyramid alone does not necessarily mean that you are eating healthy. If you are really interested in healthy nutrition and if you want to make sure that you eat healthy food, you need to understand the nutrition labels.
Unfortunately, food products are not what they used to be already for some time. Most food products contain all sorts of artificial additives most consumers have difficulties remembering and much less identifying. Food manufacturers are adding and subtracting various ingredients in order to make their products more appealing, tastier and “healthier”. However, health claims that are typically written in large print on the front of the food packages such as “sugar-free”, “light” and “low-fat” are very misleading and these food products are not necessarily a healthier choice. For example, “sugar-free” means that the product does not contain any sugar which good, right? Not necessarily because the sugar was most likely simply replaced by an artificial sweetener or two. Just as problematic are the claims “low-fat” and “light” because the product may be still high in calorie content.
As you see, reading nutrition labels is much more important than it may seem at a first glance and for that reason it is worth to take time when going to the grocery and actually read the nutrition labels. But there is another problem. How to decipher all those strange names and numbers? Honestly speaking, you cannot at least not at the site unless you have a laptop along because there are thousands of different artificial additives that can be added to food products. The only way to be sure that you are not buying food products containing manmade chemicals is to look for labels “without artificial additives”, choose products containing ingredients you actually know what they are or buy organic food.
Organic food seems the safest choice if you want to avoid artificial additives but finding organic food in abundance of products with misleading labels such as “all natural”, “natural”, “pure”, “bio”, etc. can be very challenging. Although labels such as “natural” and “bio” imply that these products are more healthy than the ones from the competition they are not. If you are interested into food that was grown without the use of chemicals and that does not contain any artificial additives you need to look for products that are certified organic. By choosing organic food you will also avoid ingesting residues of pesticides, antibiotics, growth hormones and other hazardous chemicals that are usually used in conventional farming. Residues of these chemicals are not found on the nutrition labels but they can be found in most conventionally produced foods.
In addition to choosing food that contains as little artificial additives as possible or buying exclusively organic, it is also important to pay attention to genetically modified food products because their long-term effects on health remain unknown. And yes, genetically modified food is already on the shelves. As much as 77% of soybeans produced globally is genetically modified.