As I went for vacation and seminar two weeks ago, I went to many market, again, discovered one common mistakes consumer usually make, they are so attracted to latest advertisement, brand, free gift and also promotion. I posted before about the importance of food label, I would like to spend an hour now to re-emphasize how we can be a smart consumer in picking the right food and beverages. What do you usually buy from
market? Look for the cheapest price, brand or quality? So, to guarantee
you will buy the right products for the best of your health, it is necessary
for everyone to learn how to read food label before you make any purchase of foods
and beverages.
As a smart consumer, there are some simple things we should be
aware with food products. The first things that we should pay attention to is
about expire date. Normally for canned food, there will have shelf life about 2
to 5 years while for milk products,
those ready to drink packet wil last for around half year; powder can last
longer for around 1 year. I had bad experience with some shops as they simply
put those expired biscuit mix together with those non expired biscuit. Thus, no
matter what type or what brand of food or beverages products, remember expired
date is a very important check point for your purchase.
Next is about nutrition label (an image of nutrition label is as above as what I snapped). Nowadays a lot of products
claim less sugar or low fat, but is it really ‘less’ sugar or what can we
understand about the term of less sugar. Actually less sugar is more directed
to reduce 25% of sugary content from its original products. For example, if a
packet of original flavor soy milk contain 20g sugar per serving, less sugar
soy milk still contains around 15g sugar which is equal to 3 tsp per serving/
packet. According WHO, female is allowed a maximum 71/2tsp and male with maximum
10tsp in a day. Hence, this 3 tsp means you already take around 40% from the maximum
total sugar intake in one day. We should bear in mind that not only beverages
provide sugar but your snack such as biscuit or ice cream do contain certain amount
of sugar. Some people are unaware about this and this lead towards diabetes
mellitus in future life. Thus, we really need to look at the nutrition facts
before purchase.
Another problem we might face is cereal
products such as cereal drink or oat drinks. We never read the nutrition fact
when we shop for those beverages. Some just blindly follow advertisement for
the most popular or most branded one. One thing we shouldn’t miss out is about
sugar. Most of the products will mention amount of sugar for one serving. If
you are able to find that less than 5g per serving, that is consider low sugar
products while those more than 15g per serving is in the category of
high sugar beverages. If those products without label of sugar amount, try look
into the ingredients part to identify any added
sugars such as sucrose, glucose,
fructose, corn or maple syrup which add
calories but not other nutrients, such as vitamins and minerals. Lastly, we should always look
for nutrition label of a food product before 100% believe it is a healthy
product from its advertisement.