Reading Food Labels

Ingredients

Reviewing the ingredients list is important, especially if your kids have food allergies. Reading the food label pictured above, you can see that this food has cow's milk, wheat flour, and eggs, so wouldn't be a good idea for a child with a milk, wheat and/or egg allergy.

The ingredient list can also help you identify 'hidden' ingredients, like added sugars (bad), whole grains (good), and trans fats (bad).

Added Sugars

Foods with added sugars will list corn syrup, fruit juice concentrates, honey, molasses, etc. on their ingredient list. Other names for added sugars can include:

• brown sugar
• corn sweetener
• dextrose
• fructose
• glucose
• high-fructose corn syrup
• invert sugar
• lactose
• maltose
• malt syrup
• raw sugar
• sucrose
• sugar
• syrup

Whole Grains

The ingredient list can also help you find foods made with whole grains, which are healthier and are preferred to refined grains. Whole grain foods should have one of the following whole grain ingredients listed as their first ingredient:

• whole wheat
• whole oats
• brown rice
• bulgar
• graham flour
• oatmeal
• whole grain corn
• whole rye
• wild rice

On the other hand, a food is not made with whole grains if it is labeled with the words multi-grain, 100% wheat, seven-grain, stone-ground, bran, or cracked wheat.

Trans Fats

Although the amount of trans fats isn't yet listed on most food labels, making them hard to avoid, you can often identify that they are in a food if it lists 'partially hydrogenated vegetable oil' on the ingredient list.