How to Read a Food Label Without Getting Fooled
The Packet That Taught Me the Lesson
I used to buy a particular "high fibre digestive" biscuit because the front of the pack said wholewheat, no maida, and source of fibre. I was eating four or five a day with tea and feeling reasonably good about it.
Then I turned the packet over.
The first ingredient was refined wheat flour. Sugar was second. There were 4.5 g of sugar per biscuit — five biscuits a day was more added sugar than a soft drink, and I was congratulating myself on the fibre.
Nothing on that packet was illegal. Everything on the front was technically true. It was just designed so that you would never turn it over.
The front of the packet is advertising. The back is information. Learn to skip straight to the back.
Rule One: The Ingredient List Is Ranked by Weight
This is the single most useful fact about food labels, and most people do not know it.
Ingredients are listed in descending order of quantity. Whatever is first makes up the largest share of what you are holding.
So:
- If sugar is in the first three ingredients, it is a sugar product regardless of what the front says
- If refined flour (maida) is first, "contains wholewheat" further down means very little
- If you cannot pronounce most of the list, it is a heavily processed product
A short list is usually a good sign. Real food has few ingredients. A packet of roasted chana has one. A packet of "multigrain health mix" often has twenty-six.
Watch for the sugar trick as well. Manufacturers split sugar into several forms — sugar, invert syrup, dextrose, maltodextrin, fruit juice concentrate — so that each one individually appears lower down the list. Added together they would often be first. If you see three or four of these names in one list, treat it as a sugar product.
Rule Two: Always Check the Serving Size
This is where most labels quietly mislead you.
The nutrition table is almost never for the whole packet. It is for a "serving" that the manufacturer defines — and they define it small, because small servings produce small, comfortable numbers.
Real examples I have found on Indian shelves:
- A namkeen packet listing values per 30 g, when the packet holds 150 g. Nobody eats a fifth of a packet.
- A cereal listing per 30 g without milk. The bowl you actually pour is 60-80 g.
- A "healthy" fruit juice listing per 100 ml in a 250 ml bottle.
The fix: before you read a single number, find the serving size, then work out how much you will realistically eat and multiply. If the multiplied numbers look bad, they are bad — the label was just presented flatteringly.
Where the label gives a per 100 g column, use that instead. It is the only column that lets you compare two products honestly.
Rule Three: The Four Numbers Worth Checking
Ignore most of the table. These four tell you almost everything, and I read them per 100 g.
Added sugar — the most important number on the label.
- Under 5 g per 100 g is genuinely low
- 5-15 g is moderate, fine occasionally
- Over 22.5 g is a sweet, whatever the packet claims
Note that total sugars include naturally occurring sugars, like the lactose in plain milk or curd. It is the added sugar that matters, so cross-check against the ingredient list.
Sodium / salt — the number Indians most consistently underestimate.
- Under 120 mg sodium per 100 g is low
- Over 600 mg per 100 g is high
- The WHO daily limit is about 2000 mg of sodium — roughly one level teaspoon of salt for the entire day, including what goes into your cooking
Protein — worth checking on anything sold as a health food. If a "protein" biscuit has 5 g per 100 g, it is a biscuit.
Trans fat — should read 0 g. If you see partially hydrogenated anything, or vanaspati, put it back. Also note that a product can legally declare 0 g trans fat if it contains under 0.2 g per serving, so the ingredient list remains the more reliable check.
The Claims on the Front, Translated
Front-of-pack claims are regulated in the sense that they are not outright lies. They are still designed to be misread.
"Sugar free" — no added sucrose. Often contains other sweeteners, and frequently just as many calories from fat. Sugar-free sweets are still sweets.
"No cholesterol" — on a vegetable oil, this is meaningless. No plant oil has ever contained cholesterol. It is like advertising water as fat-free.
"Made with real fruit" — a legally sufficient amount can be under 2%.
"Multigrain" — contains more than one grain. Says nothing about whether any of them are whole. "Wholegrain" is the meaningful word, and only if it appears first in the ingredients.
"Baked, not fried" — often has similar fat content to the fried version, because the fat is added to the dough rather than the fryer.
"Natural" / "farm fresh" / "goodness of..." — these have no regulatory definition whatsoever. They are decoration.
My Thirty-Second Supermarket Check
This is all I do now, and it takes half a minute.
1. Turn the packet over immediately — never buy on front-of-pack claims
2. Read the first three ingredients. If sugar or maida is among them, it goes back
3. Check the serving size and multiply for what I will actually eat
4. Glance at sugar and sodium per 100 g
5. If the ingredient list is longer than the nutrition table, it goes back
The deeper realisation for me was simpler than any of these rules: the foods that need the most convincing packaging are usually the ones worth avoiding. Dal, vegetables, curd, eggs, fruit, nuts and grains do not come with health claims, because they do not need them.
I still buy packaged food. I just buy it knowing what is in it rather than what the front of the box would like me to believe.