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3 Things to Pay Attention to on a Nutrition Label

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3 Things to Pay Attention to on a Nutrition Label

Jul 21, 2021

Nutrition labels on the back of food products can be confusing. On today's Health Minute, registered dietitian Theresa Dvorak explains three key things to look for and understand on nutrition labels and what they mean for your health.

Episode Transcript

Interviewer: What are three things you should pay attention to when you're reading a nutrition label? Registered dietitian, Theresa Dvorak, help us out with this one.

Theresa: Yeah, sure. So the three keys would be serving size, fat content, sodium content. So what is a serving? Is it the entire package? Is it three cookies? So looking at that can help us make smart choices.

Fat content. Often, there's a lot of hidden calories from fat in our packaged foods. So, especially, is it coming from saturated fat or unsaturated fat?

And thirdly, sodium content. To make foods taste better, we put salt in them, but we should only be getting about 2,300 milligrams of salt per day. So there's often way too much in our processed foods. So, again, those three takeaways would be serving size, fat content, sodium content.

updated: July 21, 2021
originally published: April 9, 2019