Understanding what type of food goes into your body is incredibly important to maximize overall health and longevity. The food you put into your body will ultimately dictate how much energy you have, you long you live, and how good you will feel throughout the day. In addition to the quality of food being important for your body, the quantity is equally of important. If you overeat on the amount of calories that you need to maintain your weight every day, you will gain weight over time. Being overweight can lead to numerous different health issues down the read. One of the ways that we can navigate the overall calorie content of foods is through the use of nutritional labels. Nutritional labels are on the back of most prepackaged and some whole foods. Nutritional labels are incredibly useful because they give us an estimate of how many calories or energy the food contains, in addition to all of the nutrients that comprise of the food itself. Unfortunately, reading nutritional labels are not always the most intuitive to navigate. This article will talk about serving size and serving amounts on nutritional labels, in a summary of the video above.
What is Serving Size on a Nutritional Label? – Nutritional Label Tips
When looking at a nutritional label, there is a lot of information to take in. calcium, calories per serving, protein, and many more words and phrases fill the labels. At the top of the nutritional label, you will typically see a large bold “calories” with a big number next to it. This is the amount of calories per serving in the given food you are looking at. A serving can vary from item to item. A serving for a bag of chips, might be 15 chips, while a serving for a personal pizza might be 1/2 of a pizza. You can tel exactly what the serving size is for the food by looking at the “serving size” typically right above the calorie content. This is a great start, but does not tell you exactly how many calories are in the entire package. For the example to the right, you need to then look at the top and see how many servings there are per container. Once you find this number, you can then multiply the servings per container, by the calories per serving. This will tell you how many calories are in the entire package, item, etc. People often make the mistake of looking at the big calorie number and thinking that is the calories in the entire food. Unfortunately, this is not the case, as this is only showing the calories per serving on the nutritional label.
Overall, the nutritional label can give lots of helpful information to assist individuals on their health and wellness goals. It can be confusing at first to see all of the different serving size and calorie amounts. Simply remember that you need to find out how many calories are in one serving of the food, and THEN find the amount of servings in the food. This will give you a better idea of how many calories are in whatever you are eating. (This is incredibly useful in case you end up turning a large pizza into a personal pizza.)
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