Really Reading the Ingredients
Want to know the single post powerful tool you have for making healthful food choices at the grocery store? You probably already guessed from the picture above –it’s the ingredients list!
About 60% of people completely ignore this little gem of information, usually tucked away in small print on the back of the package.
I’m not talking about the complicated “Nutrition Facts Panel.” I’m talking about the basic list of ingredients that’s usually just below it. This is what tells you what’s actually in the food product that you’re considering eating.*
Here’s the most important thing to know to help you decode the list: The ingredients are listed in order of predominance by weight. This means that the product contains more of the first ingredient than any other single ingredient.
So if the ingredients are “oats, honey, peanut butter, water, salt” you know that there are more oats than honey in the box (even if only by a teensy, tiny bit). It also means there’s more honey than peanut butter. But if you combined the honey and peanut butter, it’s possible they would actually outweigh the oats (which, in this example, may not be a big deal — but read on.)
Now take a look at what happens if the ingredient list is just a little different: “oats, honey, sugar, peanut butter, water, salt.” Odds are good that if you combined the honey and sugar, there’d actually be more total sugar than the oats.
The conspiracy theorist in me would even go so far as to say that they are deliberately using two different types of sugar (and putting the more wholesome-sounding “honey” first) specifically because they are required to list the ingredients in order. If honey were the only sweetener in that particular product, the ingredients list would probably look more like “honey, oats, peanut butter, water, salt” — and that means people might be tipped off to the fact that sugar is the main ingredient.
But wait — there’s more! Sometimes ingredients are made up of other ingredients, such as the “Enriched Flour” at the top of the list. At that point, they create parenthetical lists, in which the sub-ingredients are also sorted by predominance by weight. You can see how this is a bit of a rabbit hole, and can make reading the list really hard to decipher. (The small font and lack of good punctuation don’t help, either).**
Let’s take another look at the same exact ingredients list from the image above — but this time, with the first eight ingredients highlighted:
Six of those eight ingredients are sugars! If they used only one type of sugar in this product, you can bet they’d be listed before the “enriched flour.”
That also means that 98% of this food is refined flour, sugar, oil, and glycerin (with a pinch of vitamins and a preservative).
Now, let’s compare those lists above — which happen to be for a breakfast product not made by Attune — to the full ingredient list in Attune Foods Uncle Sam Original cereal:
“Whole wheat kernels, whole flaxseed, salt, barley malt.”
Those sure look more like real ingredients to me! (Yes, barley malt is a type of sugar, but since it’s listed last — and after salt — we can tell there’s very little of it in the cereal).
Which would you choose to start your day?
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* There are some instances where they aren’t required to list all the ingredients used to make a food, particularly when it’s considered “trace” amounts. Also, alcoholic beverages (including things like margarita mix with the booze already in it) don’t usually list ingredients or nutrition facts.
** If only all sugars were required to be grouped together and counted as one ingredient! On a related note, check out the work that Center for Science in the Public Interest is doing to try to improve food labels.
Be well!
Andrew
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May 17, 2012 @ 04:18:00
I never go a day without reading ingredients lists. So important!
May 21, 2012 @ 18:36:00
Indeed! Being a label reader is definitely a habit I’m proud of!
May 17, 2012 @ 08:23:00
Loved the article! I never put two and two together as far as using different sugars to keep them out of that top spot on the ingredient list. Thanks for your insights, Andrew! Now I’m armed and dangerousss!
May 21, 2012 @ 18:36:00
Yay!
May 17, 2012 @ 08:32:00
I find that this is a huge issue with “natural” and “healthy” packaged foods – having multiple sweeteners, so the sugars aren’t the first ingredient. Another trick is “grouping” ingredients. They might list something like “clusters” and then have all those ingredients in parenthesis. If you add the sugar in the clusters and the sugar that is now listed as the second or third ingredient (after the clusters) then sugar is probably the most abundant ingredient! Thanks for pointing this issue out Andrew, I’ve never seen a post on this topic before.
May 21, 2012 @ 18:37:00
Absolutely – the “grouping” is a huge problem (which is also what I tried to illustrate in that second image). The other thing that’s been driving me crazy in “natural” and “healthy” packaged foods is the abundance of brown rice syrup as a sweetener. But that’s for another post. ;)
May 17, 2012 @ 08:57:00
Great article! It’s so important to read food labels, but you want to make sure you’re reading them correctly, and not being mislead…food companies are so sneaky!
May 17, 2012 @ 23:40:00
I read labels all the time, and my favourite ingredient lists are the ones that are shortest. If I get very bored till the middle of the list, I don’t buy the product! The sorting by amount is enlightening, thank you, Andrew.
May 21, 2012 @ 18:35:00
Short lists are definitely the way to go! Though I’m not a fan of choosing an arbitrary number — so I like your “if I’m bored, I don’t buy it” idea. :)
May 17, 2012 @ 13:33:00
Great article Andrew!
May 21, 2012 @ 18:38:00
Thanks, Cassidy!
May 17, 2012 @ 14:07:00
Andrew this is a great article. I’m gonna share this next week with my “TOPS” group…
May 21, 2012 @ 18:38:00
Great! (What’s a TOPS group?)
May 17, 2012 @ 16:13:00
I always read labels, but didn’t actually think about combining the different sugars. Wow, how sneaky they are! Thanks for the good information, Andrew.
May 21, 2012 @ 18:39:00
Hooray! So glad this was able to help you see through one of the biggest “tricks” on the label.
May 17, 2012 @ 17:57:00
I learned to really read the labels when I participated in Unprocessed October last year. It was a real eye opener and I have really cleaned up my diet since then.
May 21, 2012 @ 18:39:00
You have no idea how happy it makes me to read this. Bravo!! :)
May 18, 2012 @ 00:31:00
as the list is ordered by weight, why would the riboflavin (B2) be second in command? is it such a heavy ingredient, probably not… Wiki states it was discovered in eggs in the 1920′s and used as yellow colouring also. another sneaky thing I think is connecting the “soy and palm oil” in one listing, I don’t know about the soy oil but the palm oil production is devastating ofcourse. thanks for the article, a nice one!
May 21, 2012 @ 18:44:00
Are you talking about the riboflavin that’s in the enriched flour? When foods are made up of a group of other ingredients, such as “enriched flour,” then the list of sub-ingredients is sorted by weight within that list. It can add another layer of complexity to reading the labels — which is why I grayed out some of the ingredients in the second image… trying to illustrate my point. So the riboflavin in the enriched flour is probably only a tiny amount.
As for the soy & palm oil — neither is a great choice. The food company here is grouping them together because that way they can change their formula based on whatever is cheaper. (You’ll see “and/or” a lot when it comes to oils, for this very reason.)
If you want some more info on which oils are the best, I put together a cooking oil comparison chart (with Andy Bellatti) a couple of months ago. http://www.eatingrules.com/2012/02/cooking-oil-comparison-chart/
May 18, 2012 @ 10:49:00
Thanks for this post. I wasn’t aware of the politics within food labels. Good to know. I’ll pay more attention to this when shopping for food.
May 21, 2012 @ 18:44:00
Hooray!
May 19, 2012 @ 16:29:00
Enriched. When it comes to flour I hate that word. Well hate is a strong word. But then again I have strong opinions… (insert smiley face here). GREG
May 21, 2012 @ 18:45:00
They’re legally obligated to enrich the flour… (If you want un-enriched, refined flour, the best way to find that is to buy Organic…).
And you, have strong opinions? Nahhhh….!
May 20, 2012 @ 13:30:00
Excellent commentary on the duplicitous nature of our current food labeling system. As a health educator, I encourage my students to choose foods that don’t have a label. Skip all this nonsense, and just eat real food – fruits and veggies is a great place to start. As a nation, we are so hung up on educating people to be label-savvy but big ag has a bigger budget than you and I do and they will continually try to dupe the average guy meandering the supermarket aisles. Sooo… beat them at their own game and walk right by – heading straight for the farmers, the produce section of your grocery store, the fishmonger, the butcher, and other real people selling real food.
May 21, 2012 @ 18:47:00
Oh, yes, I’m totally in favor of buying foods without labels!
But it’s unrealistic to think that people won’t be buying food without labels, at least not entirely. I therefore think it’s important that people be empowered to make better choices, and reading the ingredients list is one way to do that.
Keep up the good fight!!
May 21, 2012 @ 18:49:00
Oh, I should probably also point out that the ingredients lists on Attune’s breakfast cereals are very short and easy to understand.
I want my food to rot »
May 23, 2012 @ 12:50:37
[...] you notice that this crust has 3 sources of sugar in the first 5 ingredients? Check out this great post concerning the fractionating of sugars into separate ingredients just so the finished product looks [...]
Jun 19, 2012 @ 05:07:00
If the ingredients list ‘sugar’. Does this mean it could be any type of sugar or is more than likely to be sucrose? I find it very confusing, when ingredients just list ‘sugar’ without detailing / explaining further!
Jun 20, 2012 @ 08:07:00
GREAT information, thank you!!!
When I was trying to lose 100 pounds, I was only concerned about calorie counts and I was eating a TON of processed foods because it was portion controlled. Once I learned the “how” of eating in moderation, I realized that eating processed foods was not making me feel good. Now, I try not to eat any of it.
It’s hard to avoid sometimes, but I try to cut processed foods out (exception: condiments). I would much rather eat foods with 5 ingredients or less listed on the box, or something from my garden.
Aug 02, 2012 @ 07:56:00
So, before I could even start reading your post, I was totally jarred by the ingredients list: taken out of context, I had NO IDEA what that food product was! It scares me to think we’re eating food we can’t even identify after a thorough reading, let alone a quick glance (as with your Uncle Sam Original example later in the post).
October #Unprocessed FAQ: Additives, Preservatives, and other Confusing Ingredients — Eating Rules
Sep 28, 2012 @ 13:05:56
[...] When you start reading the ingredient lists for most packaged foods, you’ll see some patterns emerge. I’ve already discussed a few of these in recent posts: Refined flour shows up a lot, and sugar is in nearly everything (often several times under different names, so it appears lower in the list). [...]