Understanding labels

Food labels can be useful to help you and your child decide how suitable a product is but what exactly should you be looking for?

Whatever type of insulin regime your child is on, nutritional labels should be used to guide food choices that are generally low in saturated fat and added sugars. The ‘traffic light’ labelling (in the figure right) on some packaging is a quick useful guide to the fat, sugar and salt content of a food. The colours refer to a described portion of that food, and only apply if that portion size is eaten.

Here are some other things to bear in mind:

• A product containing natural sugar (yogurts, smoothies, fruit juice) should have less than 15g of sugar per 100g. If it has more than this, it will contain some added sugar too. See the table to the right, if the food you have chosen fits into the ‘a lot’ values, it means it should be seen as an occasional food choice rather than a regular one, as it is too high in fat, sugar or salt.
• Be aware that some products that are ‘low in fat’ can be higher in sugar than the original version, and so are not always better.
• The ‘Guideline Daily Amounts’ on labels are for adults, not children.
• If your child is carb counting use the carbohydrate value from the nutritional label (which includes starches and sugars) not the ‘sugars’ from the traffic light labelling.

On the full nutritional label, when you look at the ‘per 100g’ value: