Nutrition Fact Labels

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)  and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have done a pretty good job of requiring packaged foods in the US to contain informative nutrition information for consumers. The basic "Nutrition Facts" label is something that I think every American shopper has seen. An example of one is shown on the left just to clarify what I am talking about.

The purpose of this page is to help you understand what all the information on these labels means and, more important, how you can use that information to make good food choices for weight loss.

First of all, the FDA itself has VERY detailed information for consumers about Nutrition Facts labels. Unfortunately, the FDA may have gone a bit overboard and offered so much information and detail that many people feel overwhelmed. My goal here is to make this a simple as possible.

Let's start by looking at an image taken from FDA and shown below in color. Don't worry that you can't read the text; the point is that in trying to explain their labels, they have done a LOT of writing.