3 steps to reading food labels after gastric sleeve

Confused about what to buy in the supermarket? Food labels can be tricky, especially when there are multitudes of products to choose from and now you have a sleeve and want to make sure you’re making the best choice.

Reading food labels after gastric sleeve doesn’t have to be a terrifying or frustrating experience. You just need to know where to look and what to look for. Follow these three simple steps and you’ll be out of the shops in no time with a healthy basket.

Step 1 – Check the front…

Australia’s Health Star Rating System has been in place for the past couple of years and is a good place to start. The Health Star Rating is a general overview as to the healthiness of a product. Like with the energy star rating on white goods, the more stars the better. The Health Star Rating is especially good for comparing products of the same category as you don’t even have to pick them up off the shelf. See the front image of the Complete Dairy High Protein milk with a Health Star Rating of 5, right.

A word of warning here… Don’t rely on health claims you might see on the front of the label. Examples of these are things like: “Fat Free”, “All Natural”, “No Added Sugar” etc. These claims can be misleading and often won’t tell you the full story. Instead… Just check the Health Star Rating then move on to Step 2.

Step 2 – Turn the packet over and check the Ingredients List

All ingredients in a food must be listed on the label in order from most prominent to least by weight. Looking at the first three ingredients in the ingredients list will give you a pretty good idea of how healthy the product is. As a general rule of thumb, if any of the first three ingredients in the list are a fat, sugar or salt, then it’s best to put it back. This obviously needs to be taken with a grain of salt – if you’re looking at a bottle of olive oil or a bag of sugar, then of course you’ll need to throw this rule out the window, but with most products, it works really well.

The trick here is to be familiar with other names that may disguise fat, salt and sugar. Keep an eye out for any of the following:

• Fat can be disguised as Hydrogenated oil, Coconut Oil, Palm Oil, Cream, Whole Milk or Milk Solids.
• Sugar can be disguised as Fructose, Glucose, Dextrose, Honey, Molasses, Brown Sugar, Invert Sugar, Turbinado, Corn Syrup, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Maple Syrup, Crystalline Fructose
• Salt can be disguised as Monosodium Glutamate (MSG), Sodium, Sodium Chloride, Baking Soda, Baking Powder, Brine, Sea Salt, DiSodium, Celery Salt, Garlic Salt (and any other flavour of salt!).

Step 3 – Delve into the Nutrition Information Panel

The Nutrition Information Panel (NIP) on a food label offers the simplest and easiest way to choose foods with less saturated fat, salt (sodium), added sugars and kilojoules, and more fibre. However, you need to know what you’re looking for; otherwise this is just a table full of meaningless numbers!

Firstly, look at the serving size and servings per pack. Often, the listed serving size will be too big for you after your sleeve and there will be more servings per pack than suggested, so if you’re using the “per serve” column in the table, you’ll need to adjust the values so you know exactly how much you’re eating. For example, in the Complete Dairy milk NIP, a serve is 250ml, and there are four serves per bottle, but you might only have 125ml (1/2 cup) so you’re only having half the amount of all the nutrients listed in the per serve column.

Next, check the energy. Ideally after a sleeve, you’ll eat around 300 calories (~1200kJ) for a meal and around 100-150 calories (400-600kJ) for a snack. Use the per serve column to check to see how this food item fits into your total daily calories.

Protein is always second on the NIP. After a sleeve, ideally you’ll have protein at each meal and snack (see this post for more on how much you need).  When looking at the NIP, a high protein meal is one has more than 10g of protein and a snack, more than 5g of protein (use the per serve column to work out how much you will actually eat).

Total and saturated fat. Ideally no more than 30% of your energy (calories) should come from fat and a maximum of 10% from saturated fat. If you are eating a 1200 calorie diet, this means no more than 40 grams of fat per day (and around 13g of saturated fat). On a NIP, look for less than 10g of total fat per 100g (the column on the right) and less than 3g of saturated fat per 100g.

By now you’ve checked the ingredients list so hopefully you won’t have too many added sugars, but check the NIP, to see the level of sugar anyway.  Ideally with sugar less is better, however foods like milk or fruit have natural sugars, so they show sugar in the NIP although they are not unhealthy. A food with less than 10g sugar per 100g is a good choice, but if you are prone to dumping syndrome you want to go for less than 5g to be safe.

Last on the list is sodium – the fancy word for salt. We should all be trying to eat less than 2000mg of sodium each day, which can be tricky in our current world of eating processed foods. On the NIP, a food with 120-400mg sodium per 100g is good, but less than 120mg per 100g is best.

Some products will have fibre in their NIP as well. Fibre keeps you fuller for longer and is good for digestive health, so the more the better. Look for foods that have more than 3g per serve.

Got it?! Don’t worry – you don’t have to remember everything, I’ve made a wallet card for you (see the box at the end of this post) – just print and cut out and stick it in your wallet so you have it there to refer to in the supermarket. We also talked about this on the LWAS Community Live Q&A session and I’ve posted an excerpt of this discussion on YouTube if you’d like to watch. The Eat for Health website also has more information on reading labels and health claims which is great, too!

One final thought I want to leave you with. This one comes from the lovely Michael Pollen and his book Food Rules which I absolutely love because it keeps things simple… “Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” Think about this one when reading those labels –if you don’t know what the ingredients actually are, then it’s probably best you leave it on the shelf!