Know your labels - Your guide to reading food labels

Additional information

• Looking at the label can help you decide whether the product contains ‘a little’ or ‘a lot’ of fat, sugar, salt and fibre.
• Use the ‘per 100g’ column on the label to compare the make-up of similar food and ‘per serving’ for different food.
• The table below guides you as to how much nutrient is in your food or drink per 100g so check against your actual serving size.
• If the quantities fall between the ‘a little’ and ‘a lot’ figures this is a moderate amount.
• The figures for sugar can’t tell you how much of the sugar comes from natural sugars (for example fruit sugar known as fructose) and how much comes from added sugars (eg sucrose).
• To see whether the product is high in added sugar look at the ingredients list, which always starts with the biggest ingredient first.
• Remember you don’t need to avoid all food and drink that contain a lot of fat, sugar or salt - it’s the overall balance of your diet that counts.
• Please select from the label items on the right to decode some of the words you may find on food labels.