Kids nutrition tip sheet – Food labelling and ingredients

Placing nutritional information on packaging is a popular endeavour today, but you have to ask ‘just how much information can you fit on a packet before it simply ends up a confusing mural?’ GI ratings, percentages of RDI, DIs, ticks, logos, low and high this and that, the list goes on. While the nutrition panel may be intimidating, it can provide you with some simple information that is both relevant and reliable.

So let’s take a look at just what must go on a label, the really useful part of labels, and some of the other images and information that now adorns our food packaging.

Food labelling musts

Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) governs labelling laws. If you want to access the nitty gritty about labels, the FSANZ website is the place to go. In fact it is a wealth of information with a food calculator and fact sheets, plus the latest nutrition news.

Food manufacturers are required to include a nutrition panel with information on energy, serving size, the number of servings in the product, carbohydrates and sugars, fat and saturated fat, protein, fibre and sodium (salt). This information must be given for both a serving size and 100g. In addition, where a manufacturer makes a comment regarding cholesterol or fat, or other nutrients, they are required to include a breakdown of each of these. Manufacturers must also provide a complete list of ingredients, in descending order from the ingredient that constitutes the greatest amount to the least. Food in small packages may be exempt from requiring an ingredients list.

Some exceptions for labelling exist, for example small quantities: where the average energy content of a serving or unit quantity of the food is less than 40 kJ (just over 9 calories), it may be expressed in the panel as ‘LESS THAN 40 kJ’. Likewise if the average quantity of protein, fat, classes of fatty acids, carbohydrate, sugars or dietary fibre in a serving or unit is less than one gram, that average quantity can be noted as ‘LESS THAN 1 g’.

However, food is much more than just these few nutrients — there are hundreds of vitamins, minerals and health compounds we require for good health. And, let’s not forget that eating should be about more than just numbers, it’s about quality ingredients and enjoyable foods that add variety to our diet.

Nutritional panels – friend or foe?

Definitely friend! If you have found yourself glazing over while scanning a nutrition panel because of the sheer volume of numbers staring back at you, glaze over no longer. There is a real advantage in being able to sift out the important bits. You may be surprised at just how simple it is to use these very handy numbers to pick the best products for you and your family.

Start with the 100g column

You can find up to four columns of information on a nutrition panel. Trying to interpret all that information for a trolley full of shopping is likely to mean you will have to take your sleeping bag for the trip! To make it simple, just look at the 100g panel. Not only is it easy to read, but it also means that when comparing products you are comparing relevant values. For example, let’s say you are comparing two cereals, one product has a serving size of 40g and another has one of 30g, as shown in Figures 1 and 2. By using the ‘per 100g’ panel you are comparing ‘apples with apples’.

But what about the other columns?

Using the ‘per serve’ column is good to give you an idea of the amount of a nutrient that just one standard serve (as deemed by the manufacturer) of the product will contribute overall. In some cases you will also find a DI or ‘total daily intake’, which we will take a look at later. Keep in mind that servings may be less relevant for a food that you would eat with other foods and that what a manufacturer considers a serve may differ from what you would eat in a sitting.

Carbs and sugars – know the difference!

Now here is a great piece of consumer power! Using the carbohydrate and sugars figures you can find products with less simple sugar. This can be a great way of improving fibre and more complex forms of carbohydrates in your diet and keeping simple sugars in balance.

Here’s how you do it. Consider:

The total carbohydrates figure represents all sugars, naturally occurring and added, simple and complex.
The total ‘sugars’ figure on the other hand indicates how much of these carbohydrates are simple sugars (naturally occurring and added).

It’s important to point out that not all simple sugars are bad; in fact naturally occurring ones such as lactose from milk and fructose from fruit have many health functions. Added sugar is the ‘bad guy’, with more and more studies showing how it contributes to weight issues, diabetes and even cancer.

So while these figures don’t tell you if the sugars are added (that’s where the ingredients panel is best), it will show you what proportion of the carbohydrates are simple sugars, and what proportion come from more complex carbohydrates that are associated with many health benefits.

A practical example — comparing cereals*

Looking at the example below, we can see that cereal A has 73.3 grams of carbohydrates (that is all the sugars, simple and complex, natural and added). The total sugars figure is 24.1g. So we can deduct that 49.2 (67%) of the carbohydrates are from complex carbohydrates (73.3 – 24.1) and the rest (33%) are from simple sugars. Cereal B has only 2.3g of sugars representing about 3% of the total carbohydrates. We can see from the ingredients panel A that the sugars come from added sugars such as sucrose and naturally occurring sugars from milk products, honey, fruit and so on — more on this next.

Other columns

You may also see columns listing Quantity per serving with other foods. For example, a breakfast cereal nutrition panel may show a nutrient breakdown column with milk. One of the newest additions to the labelling family is the % Daily Intake, which we will look at soon.

News flash! Nutrition labelling in ‘fast food joints’

Just recently, the US House of Representatives passed legislation requiring chain restaurants with 20 or more outlets to provide nutrition information, similar to that found on packaged food. Calories will be noted on menus, menu boards and even drive-through menu boards. Stay tuned to see if this filters down under.

Figure 1
Example of a breakfast cereal label A

NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION
SERVINGS PER PACK: 22 SERVING SIZE 40g	Average per serve	DI	PER 100g
ENERGY	600	8700 2080	1500kj 356 Cal
PROTEIN	3.2	50	8.0g
FAT – Saturated fat	0.7 0.2	70 24	1.7g 0.4
CARBOHYDRATE -TOTAL -SUGARS	29.3 9.6	310 90	73.3g 24.1g
FIBRE	3.0	3.0	7.6
SODIUM	105mg	2300	265mg
POTASSIUM	110mg		270mg
CALCIUM	200mg (25%)		500mg
Ingredients: Cereals (64%), whole grain cereals (51%) (wheat, rolled oats), corn, rice, puffed wheat, wheat bran, wholemeal flour, malted wheat flour), sugar, fruit pieces (10%) [sugar, dextrose, mango puree pieces (1.5%), passionfruit puree (1%), humectant (glycerol), vegetable gum (pectin), rice flavour, acidity regulator (citric acid), flavour (nature identical), wheat fibre], sultanas (7%), corn maltodextrin, minerals (calcium phosphate, iron, mango puree (1%), dried apple (1%) [contains preservative (221)], coconut (0.5%), salt, honey, barley malt extract, maze starch, emulsifier

Figure 2
Example of a breakfast cereal label B

NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION
SERVINGS PER PACK: 24 SERVING SIZE 30g	Average per serve	%Daily Intake Per serve	PER 100g
ENERGY	444	5.0	1480kj 354 Cal
PROTEIN	4.0	8.0	13.4g
FAT – Saturated fat	0.5 0.1	0.7 0.4	1.5g
CARBOHYDRATE -TOTAL -SUGARS	19.5 0.7	6.0 0.8	65g 2.3g
FIBRE	3.4	11
SODIUM	81mg	4.0	270mg
POTASSIUM	108mg	N/A	360mg
Ingredients: Whole grain wheat (97%), raw sugar, salt, barley malt extract, minerals (zinc gluconate , iron), vitamins (niacin, thiamin, riboflavin, folate)

Ingredients panels – the writing on the wall

As mentioned, FSANZ set guidelines that require ingredients be listed from the greatest to the smallest proportion (by weight). Just reading over the ingredients label can give you a lot of information about the quality of the product.

As an example, let’s take another look at the ingredients label above. From this information we can see that Product A has cereals as the primary ingredient, followed by whole grain cereals (from wheat and rolled oats), corn, rice, puffed wheat, wheat bran, flour and then sugar. Remember, sugar appears a number of times, plus there are a number of sources of fruit and other foods containing simple sugars. This might help to make sense of why some products have such high simple carbohydrates. Product B on the other hand is 97% whole grain and even though it has added sugar it is still only has 2.3g per 100g of simple sugars. Though the sodium figure is a little higher than ideal, which one would you buy for your child?

Grab your favourite cereal packet from the cupboard and have a quick look. After doing this once you will see just how simple it all is. Before you know it, you will be scanning labels in seconds. It can be quite ‘enlightening’ to note just how far up the ingredients panel sugar (and sweeteners in all their various forms) can be in some of your family favourites such as yoghurt, jam, biscuits and even pasta sauces.

Cutting the fat in the numbers

Recent findings ¹ from Europe have questioned the low-fat era (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition, 2009). In reality, it may make more sense to eat food as it is intended. For example, if a food is predominantly saturated and/or trans fats then logically such food should be consumed in conservative amounts. Unfortunately many fat-altered products are often high in sugar and/or salt. As we are now finding, added sugar has the potential to do as much damage to our health as saturated and trans fat and excessive salt isn’t too far behind in those stakes.

So, no, you are not going to be bombarded with percentages of fats here and there. Rather, let’s return to just good old informed personal choice and common sense. Here are a few tips to consider if you are concerned about fat:

Focus on good fats such as nuts and seeds, fish, avocado etc and simply cut back on products you know to have a lot of saturated fat and/or trans fats. Remember, whole foods are better in most cases than processed foods.
Animal products will be higher in saturated fat (that’s why you don’t see overweight plants) and hence should be eaten in lesser amounts.
Watch out for claims about cholesterol. Plant foods don’t contain cholesterol, so to say that chips are cooked in cholesterol-free vegetable oil is a little misleading.
Also cholesterol in food and the cholesterol our body makes in response to fat we eat do very different things in our body, with the latter being the one to watch out for. So don’t be misled by cholesterol content in food, it’s the fat you eat that causes cholesterol issues. Cholesterol made by our body is used for our hormone production and so on.
Low-fat doesn’t necessarily equate to healthy. Check your fat-altered products for other ‘tasty’ ingredients such as sugar and salt or simply use the unaltered product in minimal amounts.

What is all that new stuff on packaging?

A good question! You may now notice something called the DI or Total Daily Intake. The DI is a set of values for what is believed to be an acceptable intake for selected nutrients and energy. As yet this is not mandatory for manufacturers. Energy and the common nutrients are generally listed in this column, though you will see various representations of these depending on how the manufacturers choose to offer such information.

In fact some manufacturers have opted not to use DIs. Sanitarium believe that DIs provide information on the ‘quantity of nutrients but not quality of nutrition’. They also note that many products are not eaten in isolation, for example a cereal is often consumed with milk of some sort, fruit and even sugar or honey.

How are the DIs worked out?

According to the Food Standards Code by FSANZ, a balanced diet for an average adult may be made up of certain nutrients each day, and these are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. FSANZ estimates of the energy and nutrient needs of an average adult used for DI calculations

Energy	8,700 kj
Protein	50 g
Fat	70 g
Saturated fatty acids	24 g
Carbohydrate	310 g
Sodium	2,300 mg
Sugars	90 g
Dietary fibre	30 g

The Australian Food and Grocery Council state that ‘The Food Standards Code has set energy needs for the “average adult diet” at 8,700 kJ per day. This is a conservative estimate of energy needs. It was calculated by averaging the energy needs of a physically active man and woman of healthy weight, average height and average age of the Australian population. However, an individual’s intake will vary dependent on their energy needs and lifestyle. It may also vary from day to day . If you would like to know what the right energy intake is for you, use the Daily Intake Guide calculator.’

That’s a whole lot of averages! Needless to say, this is very difficult to apply to individuals and particularly to those most in need of nutritional support. The first hitch? Perhaps, and here is the second. Such information is only relevant for average adults and is very hard to apply to children, pregnant women and women breastfeeding. Can you see how sometimes things can just get too, well, numerical?

Where do daily intake percentage figures show up?

DI can be shown as a standard figure for example the actual amounts for the ‘average adult’, some companies show this on many of their cereal packets, as seen in Figure 3 and in Figure 1 (middle column).
DI is most commonly shown as a %DI, which is simply the percentage that a serve of that food provides of the daily intake for an ‘average adult’.
You will also find them on the tops or sometimes sides of packaging, for example as thumbnail images of %DI (as shown right).
Other than sodium, vitamins and minerals are presented as % of RDI.

Confused? While your brain begins to fog, you may also find that you end up with a bit of squint while trying to read the fine print. Oh and one more thing…

Sodium is the exception

Just to confuse things a little more, sodium doesn’t have a RDI because by-and-large we eat too much of it, whether by choice or surreptitiously in the products we buy. Sodium has an upper limit (UL), given as 2.3g (or 2300mg) for DIs. If a single serve of a product contributes 50% of the DI for sodium, you can interpret this as being half way to the upper limit in just that single serve. This is often not adequately explained on packets. Luckily recent data shows a continual drop in the sodium levels of a significant number of cereals, and more products are following suit.

Logos and endorsements on food products

An increasing number of logos, symbols and even famous faces are appearing on food product labels, providing additional information and at the same time potentially more confusing information for consumers. For example, the Heart Foundation tick turns up on some fast food packaging. Now few can argue that a fast food chicken burger would make the list of health-giving foods yet there it is! Logos and personalities can have a powerful impact on our buying habits, but it’s worth keeping in mind that even though someone endorses a product it doesn’t mean they use it themselves.

Potentially the two most well known logos on our food packages are the National Heart Foundation tick and the GI (glycemic index) symbol. Each of these organisations requires manufacturers who wish to use their logo to adhere to a set of nutritional standards they have set. Two important considerations should be noted: firstly that most consumers are unaware of the actual criteria (though much of it is available) that have been set. And secondly, just because a product doesn’t have an endorsement of this sort doesn’t mean that it is necessarily in any way inferior to those that do. The presence of these logos on a product is an expensive and often time-consuming procedure: the manufacturer generally pays for the cost of testing as well as a royalty fee to the organisation for the use of the logo. Consumer groups point out that such promotions may also give the impression that foods with endorsements can be consumed in greater quantities, sometimes at the expense of whole foods such as fruit and vegetables which have been shown to have many health giving benefits. Ultimately you are likely to find that if you read the ingredients panel and nutrition panel you can make a pretty good assessment of the product yourself.

Simple tips to choosing products

Let’s be sensible about eating. Do you know that ad where a young girl asks her mum what the difference is between butter and margarine? Mum replies ‘ask your dad, he’s the chemist’. Real people, eat real food!

These are such simple tips; in a quick glance, you’ll be able to determine a product’s nutritional offerings.

Increase fresh food and cut back on processed. Da dar! No labels to read and a whole lot healthier too!
Quickly review the ingredients panel for the presence of sugar and other simple sugars such as honey, sucrose, maltose etc.
Avoid/limit products where sugar is high up the ingredients list or where there are multiple added sugars.
Knowing how many kilojoules or calories are in a product doesn’t necessarily give you an indication of the quality and wholesomeness of the product. Opt for foods that have whole foods over processed ones in the ingredients — this is more likely to increase the nutritional benefits and lower the unwanted compounds or excesses.
Focus on quality not numbers, particularly where you are choosing products for children who should not be on restricted diets unless under the supervision of a qualified health professional.
Opt for products that resemble their starting ingredients. For example, whole-bean soy drinks, wholegrain bread. Opt for whole foods, real meat, real fruit, veggies and yoghurt, cold-pressed oils, homemade sauces and spreads and so on. This step is very likely to reduce exposure to additives, trans and saturated fats, added sugar and salt as well as increase the nutrients you gain.

Some useful links

1. Forouhi et al. Dietary fat intake and subsequent weight change in adults: results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition. cohorts. Am J Clin Nutr 2009;90:1632–41.