Shopping

Shopping - Important Read Labels and reread if its been awhile

     Current Labels were started back in the 70’s and they  were influenced by the manufacturers to be confusing.

Watch for the following words which mean animal or dairy products: Casein, Whey, gelatin

So on many labels they will list the total number of calories per serving. ( Watch sometimes what you may consider a serving is not what they consider a serving. ie: when snapple first came out a serving was not the whole bottle , but rather half a bottle. ) But then when they start to break it down into components like “fat” they switch to number of grams and percent of “daily needs”. I put “daily needs “ in quotes as these are not based on good studies for the most part. We will discuss next time that we are shooting for a low fat diet. A low fat diet is usually described as less than 20 % of the calories from fat. But they did not give you the number of calories , instead they give you the number of grams. So how do you figure out the number of calories so you can figure out what percentage of the food your looking at is fat.

Simply use the following formula, where you will put in the number of grams of fat and the total number of calories in your calculator and you will have your answer.

           Number grams of Fat x 9 calories/gram     =   % of Fat

                           Total # of calories

So reading the first label there is 2 gms of Fat per serving. So 9 x 2 = 18 calories from fat. Then dividing by the number of calories per serving : 18/200 = 9 % of the calories are from fat which is good.

On the Balsamic dressing we have 10 grams of fat per serving or 90 calories ( 9 x 10 ) . With only 100 calories per serving: 90/100 = 90 % of the calories are from fat. So very bad.