What’s really in your FOOD?

Margarine that’s mostly water, cereal full of sugar and chicken noodles with NO chicken...

THEY say you are what you eat — but do you know what you’re actually eating?

The ingredients in your favourite foods may be listed on the label, but it’s not always easy to work out what the manufacturer’s jargon means. Imagine if you could peel back the packaging and see what goes into that can of baked beans or bottle of ketchup — and how much space is taken up by sugar lumps, salt or fat.

Gillian McConnell, registered dietitian who runs Inside Out Nutrition, says it’s essential to know how to read food labels and understand what you are eating.

‘Ideally you want to try and choose foods that have as few ingredients as possible.

‘I think certainly if you don’t recognise the first four ingredients on the list of foods the packet contains, then really you should be putting it back on the shelf. ‘When what you are about to eat

looks more like a science experiment with a list of ingredients, you should avoid them and definitely not eat them on a regular basis.’

So how do we know what the foods we are buying contain? How can we judge if it is bad for us or not?

‘People get confused with labelling,’ Gillian explains. ‘But basically the ingredients are listed in order of the thing with the biggest amount first. Also you should read labels in terms of how much each food contains per 100g. So with that in mind, anything less than three grams of sugar per 100 grams is low sugar anything less than three grams of fat per 100 grams is low fat. You also want to aim for products that have less than one gram of salt per 100 grams.’

And don’t be fooled by trendy names. ‘Any kind of added sugar — whether it’s honey or agave syrup needs to be taken into account,’ Gillian says.

Nuritionist ANGELA DOWDEN has done just that. Here, she reveals the ‘singredients’ lurking in our supermarket staples...