Guides
How to read a nutrition panel without being misled by it
The panel is honest and frequently misread. Four habits remove most of the misreading.
A nutrition panel is a dense, regulated, carefully hedged document. It is also routinely misread, and in predictable ways. Four habits deal with most of it.
Check the serving before anything else
Every figure on the panel refers to the stated serving. The serving is often smaller than the container and is sometimes an awkward fraction of it. This is the single largest source of misreading, and it is at the top of the panel precisely because everything below it depends on it.
Know what reference intakes mean
Percentage figures are expressed against a reference intake for a notional adult. They are a comparison device, not a personal recommendation. They do not account for your size, your activity or anything else about you, and they are not a target.
Read the ingredient list for order, not just content
Ingredients are listed in descending order by weight. The order tells you about proportion in a way the panel does not. Where several related ingredients appear separately, their combined contribution can be larger than their individual positions suggest.
Treat front-of-pack as a shorthand
Front-of-pack schemes, whether traffic lights, scores or summary icons, compress the panel for quick comparison. They are useful for exactly that and they lose information by design. Where the front and the back seem to disagree, the back is the detail and the front is the summary.
What a panel cannot tell you
It cannot tell you whether a food suits you, whether it is a good choice in the context of everything else you eat, or how it was produced. It describes composition per serving. Expecting a verdict from it is asking the wrong question of an honest document.