When we're in the mood for healthy eating, shopping can be a daunting task. Just because a product is in the health food aisle doesn't mean it is necessarily healthy!  If you're buying everything it says on the front of the label: wholesome, healthy, natural – you might be surprised once you learn to decipher the labels on real products.

This is one of the first things that I especially advise my patients, friends and family as most of us are not familiar with this very important practice. When we look at a food label, the first thing we look for is calories, then grams of fat, protein, percentages of daily vitamin intake, basically everything but the actual ingredients.

Here are the three things I personally look for when I'm deciding whether or not to put food into my body:

1) first test, ALWAYS: the ingredient list.

The ideal is to buy things that don't have a list of ingredients. Things that are just an ingredient on their own: Spinach. Garlic. Pumpkin. Basil.

But let's say you're buying something that comes in a bundle.

The ingredients are listed in descending order, so the first ingredient is the main one, that is, the one that is present in the greatest quantity, then the second and so on. So if you are looking to buy a whole grain product, the first ingredient should always be whole grain flour (wheat, rye, rice). It is very common for many products sold in the market as “whole grains” to have flour enriched with folic acid as the first ingredient on the list, that is, white flour, which makes the food low in fiber and never wholesome.

As you can see, the ingredients list is long and at the end, it contains several items that are difficult to pronounce. These items are chemical additives, preservatives, emulsifiers, which, just as they are difficult to pronounce, are also difficult to be recognized by our body as real "food" and end up generating an inflammatory response, as our body attacks it as a " strange body". So the tip here is: look for products that contain a maximum of 5 or 6 ingredients, and that they are all easy to pronounce.

Everything on the ingredient list is entering your body and will become your cells, which directly affects your health and vitality. So eat real food!

2) second test: SUGAR content

Okay, so let's say you found a product that passed the # 1 test, the ingredient list.

Assuming this product passes the # 1 test because all the ingredients are recognizable foods, dates, cashews and chia. Just 3 ingredients and I know what all these things are. So I'm going to look at the amount of sugar, which is usually just described as carbohydrates.

To give you an idea, 4 grams of sugar = 1 teaspoon.

So 23 grams is approximately 6 teaspoons of sugar. Regarding the amount of this substance that should be eaten in a day, the American Heart Association (AHA) recommends a maximum of 6 teaspoons per day (24 grams) for women and 9 teaspoons per day (36 grams) for men. However, physiology is not an exact science and we are all different. It should be noted that some people can tolerate higher sugar levels than others, especially those with an extremely active lifestyle (just make sure it's coming from real health food sources, not processed components).

Would I still eat this product? Of course. I'm just not going to eat several of these all day just because the ingredients are natural.

3) third test - serving SIZE

Once a product passes the # 1 and # 2 tests (ingredients are real foods, sugar content is not unreasonable), I check the portion size. The reason I do this is to check the total amount of sugar in the product. In the case of the bar above, serving size is 1 unit, so 23 grams of sugar is the total amount. If the serving size says “1/2 bar” – you know there are actually 48 grams of sugar. This is something very easy to overlook, especially in the case of drinks. Let's take the example of Juice Do Bem – a brand that is well known and that you can find in your local supermarket.

The serving size is one cup which means an intake of almost 20 grams of sugar, close to your total daily allotment in just one cup of juice. Of course this sugar is coming from apples, and in the case of the stick, from dates, and that's much better than other refined sugars or corn fructose syrup, but if you're taking care of your sugar intake, it's something you should take into account.

Start reading the ingredients list, it's very interesting!

People notice different things on the label, depending on whether you're an athlete looking for more protein, whether you have allergies or intolerances, whether you're on a specific type of diet, and so on. This guide is just my way of deciphering nutrition information. I would love to know how you read ingredient labels.

 If any of this got messed up, let me know and I'll try to clear it up!

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