Pick up almost any packaged food and you will find, somewhere on the front, a bold claim: “High in protein.” “No added sugar.” “Natural ingredients.” “Wholegrain.” These claims are largely unregulated, mostly marketing, and often technically true in a way that is also deeply misleading. The front of the packet is the advertisement. The back of the packet is the truth — if you know how to read it.
Understanding food labels is one of the most practically useful nutrition skills you can develop. It takes a little initial effort and then becomes second nature — something you can do in ten seconds at the shelf rather than a lengthy analysis at home.
Here is what actually matters.
“The front of a food packet is marketing. The back is information. Learn to read the back and you’ll never be fooled by the front again.”
— Mama SaraStart Here: The Ingredients List
Before you look at a single number in the nutrition panel, read the ingredients list. This is the single most important piece of information on any food package, and most people skip it entirely.
Ingredients are listed in descending order by weight. Whatever appears first is present in the largest quantity. A “strawberry yoghurt” where sugar appears before strawberries contains more sugar than fruit. A “multigrain bread” where refined wheat flour is the first ingredient is mostly white bread with a few token grains.
The ingredients list also tells you what has been added to the food beyond its core components. Emulsifiers, stabilisers, artificial flavourings, colourings, preservatives — these all appear here. As a general rule: the shorter the ingredients list, the less processed the food. A bag of oats has one ingredient. A bag of flavoured oat sachets might have twenty.
This is not a hard law, but it is a useful shortcut: if a packaged food has more than five ingredients, look more carefully at what those ingredients are. If you can’t pronounce them or wouldn’t find them in a home kitchen, that’s information worth having. Not necessarily a reason to put the item back — just something to be aware of.
The Nutrition Panel: What to Actually Look At
The nutrition panel lists energy, fat, saturated fat, carbohydrates, sugars, fibre, protein, and salt. Most of these numbers are less useful than they appear. Here is what to focus on — and what to ignore.
Per 100g vs Per Serving: Always Use Per 100g
This is one of the most common ways food labels mislead. The “per serving” column uses whatever serving size the manufacturer has decided — and these are frequently unrealistic. A serving of breakfast cereal on a label might be 30g, when most people pour 60–80g. A serving of pasta sauce might be defined as 75g, when a realistic portion is 150g.
Always compare products using the per 100g column. It is the only fair comparison between products and the only number that doesn’t depend on a manufacturer’s creative interpretation of a “serving”.
The Front-of-Pack Claims Decoded
These are the phrases you will encounter most often on the front of packaging, and what they actually mean.
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!“No added sugar”
No sugar has been added during manufacturing — but the product may still contain a significant amount of naturally occurring sugar (from fruit concentrate, for example), or may be sweetened with other ingredients like honey, agave, fruit juice, or maltodextrin. Check the sugars number in the nutrition panel and the ingredients list regardless.
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!“Wholegrain”
A product labelled wholegrain may contain as little as 51% wholegrain flour — the rest can be refined. Check the ingredients list: wholegrain or wholemeal flour should appear as the first ingredient. If it appears second or third, after refined flour, the product is mostly refined with a wholegrain addition.
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!“Light” or “Reduced fat”
Reduced compared to the original product — which may have been extremely high in fat or sugar to begin with. “Reduced fat” yoghurt often contains more sugar than the full-fat version, because fat is replaced with sugar to maintain palatability. “Light” cream cheese is still cream cheese; it just has slightly less fat.
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!“Natural”
Entirely unregulated as a term. It means nothing legally and can be applied to almost anything. Many highly processed foods use “natural flavourings” as a catch-all term for flavour compounds that bear little resemblance to the food they’re derived from. Ignore this word entirely on packaging.
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!“High protein”
Requires at least 20% of the energy to come from protein — a threshold that some products meet with good-quality protein sources and others meet by adding collagen peptides, which are a low-quality incomplete protein. Check both the protein gram amount and the protein source in the ingredients list.
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!“Organic”
This is one of the few genuinely regulated claims on food packaging. Certified organic products must meet specific standards for pesticide use, farming practices, and animal welfare. An organic biscuit is still a biscuit — but organic certification on produce and dairy is meaningful and worth seeking when budget allows.
The Hidden Names for Sugar
Sugar appears on ingredients lists under more than sixty different names. Manufacturers sometimes use multiple different sugar sources in one product so that no single sugar appears high enough on the list to alarm the consumer — even though the combined sugar content is substantial.
The most common aliases to recognise: glucose, fructose, sucrose, dextrose, maltose, lactose, galactose (all end in -ose, all are sugars). Also: corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, fruit juice concentrate, malt syrup, rice syrup, agave nectar, cane juice, molasses, treacle, dextrin, maltodextrin.
If you see several of these in a single ingredients list, the product is high in sugar regardless of what the front of the packet says.
“Sugar has over sixty names on an ingredients list. Learning even half a dozen of them changes how you shop forever.”
— Mama SaraA Practical Rule for the Supermarket
You don’t need to analyse every label of every product every time you shop. Most of your shopping basket — fresh vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, eggs, legumes, whole grains — has no label at all, which is the point. Whole, unprocessed foods don’t need to tell you they’re healthy.
For the packaged items that are a normal part of any kitchen — bread, pasta, sauces, yoghurt, cereals, tinned goods — develop a short mental checklist:
1. Can I read the ingredients list without encountering anything I wouldn’t find in a home kitchen?
2. Is the first ingredient one I’d expect to be the main ingredient?
3. Is the sugar content per 100g under 10g for something that shouldn’t be sweet?
4. Is the salt content per 100g under 1g for something that shouldn’t be salty?
Four questions. Ten seconds. That is enough to make significantly better choices at the shelf without turning every shopping trip into a research project.
The more you do it, the faster it becomes. And once you’ve read the label on a product once, you’ve read it for life — the formulation rarely changes, and you already know what’s in it.
