Confused? - Food Labels Explained

 The Confusing  IR Food Labels Explained  

Do you find the food intake reference labels on the fronts of packets confusing?.... I did. For instance, is the percentage of fat shown the amount of fat in that pack of food? No. Ok the amount of grams of fat must be what is in the pack.., no of course not. What about the colours?... does red actually mean it's high in that particular food content. Actually Yes, so let me explain. 

Personally, first of all I use the colours as a quick visual guide and then look at the back or side of the pack for its food contents guide. I go straight to the amount of fat in 100g and POW!... there you have it the fat content of that food. Whether it be a sausage, full pack or even half sausage, if its 9g in a 100g that is 9% fat. Simple any portion size will contain 9% of fat. However saying that, if the front of pack label shows the nutrients as cooked I find this more informative.

The front of pack nutrition labelling is voluntary but may not be given in isolation; it must be provided in addition to the full mandatory (“back of pack”) nutrition declaration, which comprises energy, fat, saturates, carbohydrate, sugars, protein and salt.

OK so about those pretty coloured reference Labels. Their intended use is a guide to help people at a glance know what amount of their recommended daily intake based on the Adults Reference Intake is in the food they are buying. I must point out this from the off...The % values for the nutrients provided on the front of a pack fat, saturates, sugars, salt are % maximum amounts and not targets to aim for. The the figures are based for adults and an average for women. As a man trying to shred fat for the purpose of getting sub 12% body fat I find this information of little use, but of course your goals may be totally different.

So are they useful?, well yes and no. Yes if you are looking to control your intake in a simple lower calorie diet looking to lose or maintain weight. If you are looking to eat a healthy amount of nutrients. 

But, if your aim is to shred body fat, if your goal is visible abs then these labels are only good a quick visible guide. For body fat % loss you are going to be far more precise.

So here are those Intake Reference (IR) food labels and IR explained...

These 6 points of information, including intake reference (IR) appear on the majority of pre-packed foods. 

• 1 Portion size information expressed in a way that is easily identifiable and meaningful to the consumer. For example, ¼ of a pie, 1 burger, or in this case the recommended amount to produce a standard portion. This can be as sold or after preparation or cooking. This may also be shown as per 100g or 100 ml. 
• 2 The amount of Portions per Pack are not always shown but in general if the information is being shown by portion then often it will show the amount of portions per pack. 
• 3 Information on the Energy Value in kilojoules (kJ) and kilocalories (kcal) per100g/ml in this example are given here at point 3, but also specified per portion of the product in the row of boxes, (point 5).
• 4 Information on the Amounts of Nutrients are shown in the 5 small boxes here showing Energy, Fat, Saturates, Sugars and Salt. These 4 nutrients are obligatory. You will find the nutrients name displayed at the top of each box.
• 5 Amount of Nutrient in Grams are given here in this example per portion basis, but it may be shown per 100g/ml depending on point 1 (Portion size information)
• 6 Percentage Reference Intakes (%RIs) are given here again in this example per portion basis, but it may be shown per 100g/ml depending on point 1 (Portion size information) . It also shows the colour coding of the nutrient content of the food. Companies may additionally include the descriptors “High”, “Medium” or “Low” (HML) together with the colours red, amber or green respectively to reinforce their meaning. 

So, to the meaning of the colours...

[Figure 1]

[Figure 2]

The food label boxes (Figure 1) are coloured depending on the amount of grams per 100g or as as a percentage of grams. They are based on the government recommendations in the table above (figure 2). For a food to display a certain colour it needs to fall into certain gram per 100 gram range. In simple terms, for a food to display amber in its fat content box will contain 3% or above fat but no more than 17.5%. Remember the colours represent a range based on the food nutrients %, whereas the actual % figures shown on the label are the percentage of Reference Intakes.  

To illustrate this, the label for a cooked chicken as below (figure 3) tells us the amount of fat in 400g of this cooked chicken is 8.8g (2.2g in 100g equaling only 2.2% fat in this food). But the IR % is shown as 13%. 

[Figure 3]

The box for fat is coloured green as the fat content is only 2.2% and that falls into the bracket of below 3% as in the table (Figure 2).

More about Reference Intake.
OK, your still with me, thanks for reading so far and I hope you are finding this blog both useful and interesting. I could not finish off without explaining a little about RI.

RI values are based on an average-sized woman doing an average amount of physical activity. The recommendations are saying as part of a healthy balanced diet, an adult's reference intakes ("RIs") for a day are:

Energy: 8,400 kJ/2,000kcal

Total fat: 70g
Saturates: 20g
Carbohydrate: 260g
Total sugars: 90g
Protein: 50g
Salt: 6g

This is like 'one size fits all' and clearly it can only be used as a guide. As I said before, the use of this information is relative to a person's goal. Many of you reading this are looking for the secret to weight loss, but I hope the majority and that's both men and woman are looking to get visible abs. 

Anyone can Have Visible Abs

Let me tell you something now... anyone can have visible abs. We all have abdominal muscles, its only a layer of fat that hides them. Reducing your body fat % is the key. Not exercise, well not exercise alone. Diet alone will expose those abs, diet and exercise together will expose larger more defined abs! That is what this blog is about. Keep reading my blogs for more information on how to get those visible abs. 

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*Some of the information above has been taken from the guidance developed by the Department of Health, the Food Standards Agency and devolved administrations in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales in collaboration with the British Retail Consortium. It has been reproduced as granted and under the terms of the Open Government Licence.

Weight Gain/Loss - Simple Explanation

Why do we gain weight?

Think of your body as a bucket with a small hole drilled in the side and above is a dripping tap. The dripping tap is your calorie intake, the food you consume. The drilled hole is your body’s calorie usage, the calories you burn.

So, if the tap drips faster than your leaking bucket, we all know what happens, the bucket fills and eventually overflows?  But, this is a magic bucket!… and rather than overflowing it grows to always fit its contents. Now does that sound familiar?

So how do we lose weight?

We need to stop our bucket from constantly filling, overflowing and growing. To lose weight we need it to empty faster than it fills, we need a calorie deficit. To maintain our current weight, we need the tap to drip at the same rate as the hole in the bucket drips. So to lose weight you have two options, or even a combination of the two.

Option One: reduce the speed of the dripping tap!  I hope it’s obvious to you now, we need a calorie deficit to lose weight. Reducing our calorie intake to be less than our body’s usage will cause our body to lose body fat, simple.

Option Two: Increase the size of the leaking hole. Yes if we increase the amount of calories we burn, being more than we consume, again we create a calorie deficit and we lose weight.

The rate at which we burn calories varies, from person to person, based on your lifestyle, your normal daily activity, your workout methods, also your body type and muscle make up plus your current body fat percentage and all of this along with your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). Now this is a little complex for this simple explanation and something I will cover in far more detail in another blog.

So losing weight is easy then?.... well the idea is simple

Losing weight is just as easy as gaining weight, it’s just that we are all very good at gaining weight because we can all eat what we want, when we want without keeping track of the calories or the macros. Again keeping this simple macros are another subject I will cover in more detail, but basically they are the relative quantities of fat, protein and carbohydrates. Without keeping track of our calories, how do we know what rate the tap is dripping? To lose or maintain our weight we need to do a little homework.

So what do we need to know?      

This all depends on the amount of body fat we wish to lose. Trying to lose a few pounds before your holiday requires less homework and determination compared to losing stones of weight for health reasons, or shredding body fat to sub 10%-12% to get those visible abs. We need a starting point. All our bodies are different and as I mentioned above we naturally burn resting calories at different rates. So we need to know our goals, we need to know our starting point and a bench mark. Once we know these we can work and adjusting our dripping tap and our leaking bucket.

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