BY SHARMILA RIBEIRO
Years ago, before I embarked on my journey of healthy cooking and eating, I regularly bought all kinds of processed and packaged foods for my family. We stocked biscuits of all kinds – chocolate, cream, salty, sweet and salty, glucose etc. plus ready to eat Indian fried snacks such as murukkus and mixtures, plus readymade cold drinks, plus sweets and candies, plus chocolate coated breakfast cereal, plus peanut butter, jams, mayo and other spreads, plus cold meats like sausages. I bought all these indulgently and with love.
We all do this – its all so convenient, so easy to buy or order online and not too expensive either. And that’s the benefit as well as the cost! Most processed food that is commercially and/or mass produced comes at a relatively cheap price (cheaper than what we can make at home sometimes) but it also comes at the cost of our health. Most of the ingredients used are cheap, not nutritious and often even dangerous to our health. How would you know? Start by reading the food labels.
Manufacturers have made it such that food labels are not the easiest things to either notice or to read. But if you want to eat healthy and start cutting the junk/processed food in your diet, reading the nutrition labels is one of the first steps you need to take. Unhealthy food (or junk food) is usually defined as food that is high in sugar, fat, salt and refined carbs. Packaged processed food is usually labeled, but most of our much loved Indian sweets and snacks (which also qualify as junk) are usually not labeled.
WHAT’S ON THE LABEL
Nutrition or food labels tell us how individual foods contribute to our daily nutritional needs and help us choose healthier products. They can help us limit the sugar and fat and salt in our diets and make it easy for us to compare with other similar products. Of course, the most nutritious foods are the ones that are least processed and the ones that come with no labels – wholegrains, pulses and fresh fruit and vegetables. These are highly nutrient dense foods and spoil easily.
What to look for on a nutrition label:
- First look at the ingredients list. Ingredients are usually listed from the maximum to the least used in the product.
- Then look at the total calories, the serving size and servings per container: Most often, the label indicates the number of calories for one serving, and there is usually more than one serving size per package of food. This can be quite misleading, unless you do the maths. To arrive at your calorie intake, calculate the number of servings you will actually consume at a time (Kids will find it fun, since there’s some maths involved).
- Check the total calories versus calories from fat: If the total calories are high, and the fat calories are also high (over 50 per cent of total calories in some cases), this may not be good for you.
- Limit foods with fat, cholesterol and sodium (salt): Look for the presence of saturated fats or trans fats, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil or shortening (vanaspati, like Dalda). More than 5g of fat per 100g is a lot, 20g is very high, 3g or less is low. Also watch out for high levels of sodium (salt), which extend shelf life.
- Watch out for the sugars: Sugar levels are usually high in processed foods and listed as Total Carbohydrates or Sugars.
- Vitamins and minerals: Often added to enhance nutritional value, this is one high that’s good. But that still doesn’t mean that the product is good for you.
- Beware of the Additives: Food additives (preservatives, taste enhancers, flavourings, thickeners, food colours, spices and chemical stabilizers) are substances used to preserve flavour, to maintain safety and freshness of food, to slow down spoilage, and to improve taste, texture and appearance.
Additives are often listed in number form. For example, E621 is monosodium glutamate (MSG). Look for the INS (International Numbering System) number approved by the Food Security and Safety Authority of India (FSSAI) or E numbers (for European products).
If there is a long list of unfamiliar names at the end of the list of ingredients, they are probably additives and indicative of how highly processed the food item is. Many of these are sources of concern such as the artificial sweetener aspartame (E951), sodium benzoate in soft drinks, sodium nitrite in processed meats like sausages, potassium bromate in bread, sulphur dioxide (E220), blue, red and yellow food dyes in candies, cold drinks, cakes, icing and so much more, and butylated hydroxyanisole/butylated hydroxytoluene (BHA/BHT or E320), which is used to preserve the oil in chips, snacks and cereals so they taste fresh for a longer time.
When you think about all of this, it sounds scary. And honestly, it is. We must reclaim our food and our health, in our own kitchens.
So what’s the solution? Mindful shopping, mindful cooking and mindful eating.
- First read the labels and understand what you are buying or eating. For example if a 300ml cold drink has 13g of sugar per 100g as per the label, that means it has 33g (or 6.5 teaspoons) of sugar in total. If you are aware that the WHO guidelines for added sugar consumption in a day are 5 teaspoons (25gms), you will know that even one soft drink per day is not good for your (or the family’s) health. Similarly, a 100g portion of a savoury deep fried snack could have over 50g of fat or more than the recommended daily allowance for visible fat, which is 30-45g (2-3 tablespoons) per day. Most often the fat in commercially made food is hydrogenated oils or trans fats, for which there is no safe limit. Also, look out for high levels of sodium/salt. The recommended amount of salt is around one teaspoon per day (5-6g), which is equivalent to 2300mg or 2.3g of sodium.
- Remember that many of the salty, deep-fried snacks and sweets we buy here in India from sweet shops or bakeries are not labeled, so we need to think carefully about the (unhealthy) ingredients that go into their making, when we shop for them.
- Happiness is homemade. If you don’t do so already, start making some of food items you usually buy. You can make or bake at home almost everything that you can buy in a store. When we cook from scratch we can control the amount of sugar, salt and fat we are using. It’s not at all difficult to make a homemade biscuit, most often it tastes better and it’s most definitely healthier. Food companies are motivated by short-term profit at the long-term cost of our health.
Here’s a short list of everyday food that I make at home instead of buying from a store:
- Peanut butter
- Fruit jam
- Pasta marinara/tomato sauce
- Mayonnaise
- Chocolate sauce
- Pesto
- Muesli
- Granola Bars
- Biscuits
- Cakes
- Baked Savoury crackers
- Paneer
- Cold drinks
Some of my favourite food mantras are from the food writer Michael Pollan (from his book Food Rules – An Eater’s Manual)
- Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself
- Eat sweet foods as you find them in nature
- If it came from a plant, eat it, if it was made in a plant, don’t.
- Avoid foods that are pretending to be something they are not (such as artificial butter or margarine)
- Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-standard child cannot pronounce
- Avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients
- Avoid foods that have some form of sugar (or sweetener) listed among the top three ingredients
- Don’t eat anything your grandmother would not recognize as food
In conclusion, food labels (and statutory regulations by governments) are to help us choose our food well. By reading labels, we can effectively select products that are better for us. So go ahead, start a label reading habit (teach your kids how to read food labels too) and live a healthier life, sooner than later.