Kraft Cheese, One slice = 41 kcal

I was at the hypermarket last weekend to buy some food to stock up my fridge. Let me share to you what I bought. It might sounded boring to you, but the reality is the type of food that you have in your fridge will determine what kind of body shape and body weight that you will have.

So, ask yourself…what kind of food that you have in your fridge?

I bought 0% fat yogurt, plain yogurt, low fat milk, yogurt drink, and have the craving for cheese. What makes me buy kaft cheese is because I saw 60% Less Fat! Not so bad after all, you can still snack on slice of cheese and knowing that 1 slice of kraft cheese is only 41kcal.

Why Read Food Label?

Eating 1 slice of cheese for snack is still alright. That is why it is important to know and understand how to read food label. Knowing how much calories that you are taking and putting into your body.

Importance of Self Talk

When choosing snacks, read the label and choose wisely. Ask yourself, do you really need this snack? If yes, why? If not, why? This is to find out it is emotional buying or really buying something you want to eat that is healthy.

Weight Loss Tips For Grocery Shopping

Before going for grocery shopping make sure you don’t go during empty stomach or feeling hungry. Avoid section especially those tidbits or soft drinks section.

Take note: I am not affiliated with Kraft Cheese or promoting for them.

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What is sugar exactly?

Table sugar is just one form of sugar that we get in the diet. Sugars are carbohydrates, and they exist naturally in different forms and in all kinds of foods. The granulated sugar that you might sprinkle on your cereal is called sucrose, which is produced primarily by extracting the sugar from sugar beets or sugar cane, although it is present in lots of other plant foods, too. The primary sugar in fruits is called fructose, and there is a naturally occurring sugar in milk called lactose. When you consume a fruit, a vegetable or a dairy product, you can’t avoid consuming the natural sugar that these foods contain.

All sugars ultimately end up in the bloodstream in the form of glucose, which is the form of sugar that our body prefers to use for energy. While sugars in foods end up as glucose in the bloodstream, so do the end-products of the digestion of all carbohydrate-rich foods like fruits, vegetables and starchy foods.

We eat a lot of sugar–even in foods that don’t taste sweet. Aside from the obvious items like sodas, fruit drinks, sweetened cereals and desserts, sugar–in one form or another–finds its way into condiments, soups, breads and even savoury snacks like chips. The primary health hazard of eating too much sugar is tooth decay. The bacteria that live in your mouth can convert sugars into an acid that can destroy tooth enamel. Foods that are sweet and sticky, like fruit snacks or gummy candies are particularly a problem since the sugar stays in contact with the teeth.

How Sugar Impact Your Weight Loss Progress?

Does sugar make you fat? Certainly sugar adds extra calories to the diet, and extra calories mean extra weight. Most studies have focused on soda consumption, and several have concluded that as soda consumption increases, so does the risk of obesity. Part of the problem with beverages is that they don’t fill us up–so we can consume a lot of calories in these sweet liquids and still consume regular solid foods, too, before we feel full.

The other issue is that many foods that are high in added sugars are also high in fats and calories–cakes, pastries, ice cream and candy bars are just some of the sweet foods we eat that are loaded down with fat and calories. Food manufacturers are more than happy to accommodate America’s sweet tooth–sugar is inexpensive and adds a lot of taste to foods. To know how much sugar you are eating, it’s important to understand that many forms of sugar are added to foods. By reading the label, you may not realize how much sugar a food really contains.

Here are some other forms of sugar that you might see on a label: sucrose, fructose, glucose, dextrose, lactose, maltose, invert sugar, raw sugar, turbinado sugar, brown sugar, cane sugar, brown rice syrup, fruit juice concentrate, confectioner’s sugar, maltodextrin, corn syrup, highfructose corn syrup, honey, maple syrup and molasses.

One popular breakfast cereal marketed to children has the following ingredients: corn, sugar, corn syrup, modified cornstarch, canola oil and high-fructose corn syrup, followed by some vitamins, minerals, and artificial colors and flavors. This cereal isn’t much more than a bowl of sugar, oil and starch.

When you look at a food label, the sugar content is listed–in grams per serving–just under the total carbohydrate listing. But this includes all sugars in the food including natural sugars, so it can be deceptive. For instance, a bran cereal with no added sugar but with raisins in it might look as high in sugar as a sugary kid’s cereal. But there is a big difference in the nutritional value of the two foods, since one might contain only the natural sugar from the fruit, while the kid’s cereal will contain all added sugar.

It is very important to know how much sugars that we are actually taking into our body. No doubt that cereals could look healthy, but when looking at label it contains quite high sugar content. If you wanted to manage your weight, the best way is to take lesser drinks like soda water or take lesser sweet food like donuts with toppings and also lesser junkies like chips. The lesser artificial sugars intake you give you long term results in managing your weight and that is how sugar impact on your weight loss progress.

I’d like to know what you think.

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One of the most important skills you can master is being able to read  food labels in order to figure out exactly what you are getting from your foods. Let’s look at the example from the picture in this blog post and take the information from top to bottom…

Ready to learn reading food labels? Let’s move on…

Serving Size and Servings per Container:

Pay attention to this closely. Many people assume that small packages of cookies or crackers, or medium-sized beverage containers are single servings. But this may not be the case. An “official” serving of a beverage is 8 ounces, but many drinks are packaged in 16 oz. containers or larger. All the nutrition facts on the label are for one serving. If you drink a 16 oz. beverage, you will be drinking twice the number of calories on the nutrition facts panel, since you’ll be taking in two servings. You will need to double all the information on the label to determine exactly what you are taking in.

Calories, Fat, Carbohydrate and Protein:

As with all the other nutrients, these are the amounts per serving. In the example above, one cup of Chunky, Cheesy, Rich and Creamy Broccoli Soup has 250 calories. But if you consume the whole package (two servings), you will have taken in 500 calories. In addition to the total fat per serving, the label also tells you the calories from fat, so you can do a quick calculation in your head of what percentage of calories you are eating from fat. In the example, there are 135 calories from fat out of a total of 250 calories. You can see right away that more than half the calories in the soup come from fat. The label also tells you how much of the fat is saturated fat or trans fat. “Total Carbohydrate” tells you, again, how much carbohydrate per serving. Keep in mind that this includes natural sources, such as the natural sugars in milk or fruit, so it’s not always easy to tell from the line labeled “Sugars” where the sugar is coming from without looking at the ingredients list. If a cereal has little added sugar–but contains raisins–the sugar content may look high, but it’s just from the natural fruit sugar. Look at the ingredients list for sugar: sugar, brown sugar, cane sugar, beet sugar, corn syrup, corn syrup solids, brown rice syrup, dextrose, fructose, fruit juice concentrate, high fructose corn syrup, honey, invert sugar, maltodextrin, molasses, raw sugar, turbinado sugar and sucrose are all added sugars. Sometimes food manufacturers use a number of sweeteners in a product–each in small amounts–so the ingredients are “sprinkled” throughout the ingredients list, but taken together they can sometimes add up significantly.

Fiber and sugars are part of the total carbohydrate count. A food with 5 grams or more of fiber per serving is a good source of fiber.

% Daily Value:

Daily Values are standard values developed by the Food and Drug Administration for use on food labels. They are standards used to compare the amount of a nutrient in a food to the amount that is recommended per day, but is based on a 2,000 calorie diet that may not apply to everyone. Even if you know that you don’t require that many calories, you can still look at these values to see if a particular food is high or low in a nutrient that you are interested in. In the example above, one serving of the soup provides 30 percent of the Daily Value for calcium, which is quite a bit. But it also has 25 percent of the Daily Value for fat–that means that one fourth of the recommended fat for the day is packed into 1 cup of soup–that’s a lot of fat per serving!

Here are some things to visualize when you are looking at a food label:

Every 5 grams of fat is a teaspoon of fat (or a pat of butter). In the example above, each cup serving of soup has 15 grams of fat–that’s three teaspoons (or one tablespoon), or three pats of butter per serving! If you consume the whole can (two servings), then you are consuming six pats of butter!

Every 4 grams of sugar is a teaspoon. The soup above has very little sugar–only 2 grams per serving, or about a half a teaspoon. But a 16 oz. bottle of sweetened tea might have 30 grams per serving (and remember, the bottle is two servings of 8 ounces each). If you drink the whole bottle, you’ll be drinking 60 grams of sugar–that’s 15 teaspoons, or five tablespoons, or just under 1/3 cup!

Anyway, it always worth taking a good look at food labels each time you are at the supermarket to choose the kind of food to buy.

Don’t you think that reading food labels is such a useful skill to master?

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