SHAPE UP
Cracking the code of the food label

By Charles Stuart Platkin

Deciphering a food label is a surprisingly complicated task for something designed to be straightforward.

But here are some tips to help you decipher the words and numbers.

Know thy intake. Just because the food label lists a certain number of calories per serving, it doesn't mean that's how much you eat. Servings listed, most of the time, are far smaller than our actual intake. Try to get an accurate measurement once in a while. As for counting calories, the tricky part is understanding the value of a calorie. Keep this in mind: For every extra 100 calories each day, you have to walk an additional 25 minutes to burn it off.

Assess the fats. It's recommended that 25 percent to 30 percent of our daily intake come from fat. But there are "good" and "bad" fats.

Bad fats are the "saturated fat" listed on the food label. They are primarily in animal products such as meat, whole-milk dairy products, poultry skin and egg yolks. Consuming too many of these fats can raise your bad-cholesterol levels. Trans fats, used to increase food shelf life, are unhealthy. Be on the lookout for partially hydrogenated oil — if it's there, you have trans fat.

Unsaturated fats (monounsaturated and polyunsaturated) are good. They are found in vegetable oils (canola, safflower, peanut and olive oils), nuts, seeds, avocados and fish. Studies have found that unsaturated fat helps lower LDL (the bad cholesterol) and raise HDL (the good cholesterol) levels.

Go light on the cholesterol, moderate on the salt.

Eat "good" carbohydrates such as fruits, vegetables, starches, beans, nuts, milk and yogurt. Avoid the "bad" carbs — cookies, cakes, soft drinks, syrups and, of course, table sugar.

Carbs are broken down into two categories on the food label — dietary fiber and sugar. Dietary fiber does not convert to glucose and thus does not raise your blood sugar the way other carbohydrates typically do. It also makes you feel full longer.

The "sugars" section includes those that are present naturally in the food (such as lactose in milk and fructose in fruit), as well as sugars added to the food during processing, such as high-fructose corn syrup. Typically, our body can't distinguish between the two.