In our daily life, we always buy more or less packaged semi-finished products and prepackaged foods. But how to choose these foods?
This week is National Nutrition Week, and the theme is: know how to cook, choose, and read labels.
Choose skillful, one trick to get it done
When shopping for food, we consider and compare many factors, such as brand, price, taste, promotions.
Meanwhile, there’s another piece of information worth paying attention to, the Nutrition Fact Sheet. It is a nutrition label for packaged food, which is used to display the content of energy and nutrients such as fat, protein, carbohydrate, and sodium in a unit of food, as well as the proportion of its Nutrient Reference Value (NRV).
But if you don’t understand the information in the table and what the numbers represent, here’s a trick that can help you make healthier food choices easily.
There are often differences in the nutrient content of the same food. Therefore, when making a horizontal comparison, you can compare the sodium, fat and sugar content, or the ratio of their nutrient reference values, who has the lower content or ratio , it means that it is relatively healthier and can be preferred.
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By simple calculation, the sodium content in the Nutrition Facts table can reflect the salt content of the food (1 gram of salt ≈ 400 mg of sodium). Both the World Health Organization and the “Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents (2022)” recommend that the daily salt intake per person should not exceed 5 grams.
Snacks are healthy and learn to read the details
Daily snack purchases also make us often deal with prepackaged foods. In addition to the “contrast” tips mentioned above, to make healthy snack choices, you can look for extra salt, fat, and sugar, and avoid them as much as possible.
For example, when buying nuts, you can choose more original flavors, and choose no or less salted, charcoal-fired, butter and other multi-seasoned nuts.