Food labelling

It’s important to understand what’s in the food you eat so that you can control your intake of calories, sugar, fat and salt. Nutrition labels on food can often be difficult to understand at first sight, however, interpreting these labels properly can help to make healthier food choices simpler and easier.

Nutritional information can be found on the back or side of the packaging, and more increasingly in the form of a traffic light system on the front of the packaging.

This labelling contains information about the amount of energy the food contains (measured in kJ or kcal), as well as the fat content, the saturated fat content, the protein content, the sugar content, and the salt content. This information can either be displayed as content per pack or serving or per 100 grams of the food.

These labels also often contain a percentage below each nutrient that tells you how much this particular food will contribute to your recommended daily intake of that nutrient.

The traffic light system

Thankfully, many manufacturers are now producing food with easier to understand labelling on the front of packaging using a traffic light system to indicate the nutritional content of the food.

Front-of-pack labels usually give a quick guide to:

• energy (calories)
• fat content
• saturated fat content
• sugars content
• salt content

This can make comparing two different food choices a lot quicker and easier, as the more green colour coding you see on the packing, the healthier the food. It’s recommended to limit your intake of foods with one or more red colour coding on the label.

What do the numbers mean?

The numbers on the packaging let us know if the food we are looking at is high in fat, sugar etc. or low or somewhere in between. Have a look below for some reference ranges to help you understand food labels in future.

Helpful tools

To help with this Public Health England have developed the Food Scanner app that is free to download on both the App Store and Google Play.

The app allows you to scan barcodes of packaged food and drinks to tell you how much sugar, saturated fat, salt and calories are in foods to help you make better food choices.

The app gives you a visual representation of the quantities of each of these components in the food, so it will display how many sugar cubes worth of sugar is in a portion of a particular food and also suggest healthier options.