Reading document for English 3. Week 3, class 1

1. Reading Food Labels - Nutrition Facts Explained
The key to controlling your weight and improving your health is quite simply eating right. Read
your food labels and check over the nutrition facts to ensure that you are eating lots of the good
stuff, and little (or none) of the bad stuff. That's pretty easy to understand.
However, what might be slightly tougher for some people to understand are the food labels
themselves. What does it all mean? What should you be looking for? What are all of these
nutrients? Which ones should be high? Which should be low? Which should purposely be eaten,
and which should purposely be avoided altogether?
If you've ever turned over your package of food and asked any of these questions, you've found
the right place. It's time to get the answers.
Let's start at the top and work our way down.
Serving Size
At the very top of all food labels (right under the words
"Nutrition Facts") is the serving size. This is one of the
most important pieces of information on the label
because all of the nutrition information shown is based
on this exact amount. If you ignore the serving size, the
rest of the information is useless to you, so be sure to
notice it first.
Depending on what you're eating/drinking, the serving
size could be described a few different ways. The most
common are grams, ounces, cups, and pieces. Grams tend
to be listed most of the time even when the serving size is
first listed a different way. For example... Serving Size: 2
Pieces (100g)
If you saw this example serving size on your food label,
it would mean that all of the nutrition facts shown are for
2 pieces (or 100 grams) of that food. That means that if
you only ate 1 piece (or 50g), you can cut all of the
nutrition information in half. If you ate 4 pieces (200g),
then you should double all of the nutrition facts. This is
all pretty easy to figure out when your food's serving size is actually listed in "pieces" (or even
something like "cups" or "scoops"), but much of the time, this isn't the case.
A lot of the time serving sizes tend to be given in a unit of measurement that is nearly
impossible to tell by eye, such as grams and ounces. In these cases (and the above cases as
well), the only real way to get an accurate idea of exactly how many servings you are eating is
by weighing your food out on a food scale. Obviously this isn't too practical if you're eating out,
but for when you're home, it's perfect. (Any of these scales would be perfect.)
Most food scales weigh food in both grams and ounces. This will cover pretty much every
single food you'll ever eat, as, like I mentioned before, grams are typically always given as a
serving size.