A few moths ago I was shopping in a grocery store. I approached the rice shelf and took a packet. I was amazed when I looked at the nutritional values table printed on the rice package. In small letters it read: 360 kcal per 100 gram (6 gram of proteins, 84 gram of carbs and 0 gram of fats). This was unusual to me because I know that products of this kind in general have about 150 kcal per 100 gram. I took a different rice packet to read its nutritional facts and it was 133 kcal per 100 gram (3.2 gram of proteins, 28.3 gram of carbs and 0.7 gram of fats). Caloric value of the first rice package was almost three times greater than the second one's.

The main purpose of this article is to show the reader the importance of reading labels. Rice example should have demonstrated that. Moreover, reading the big letters like: "low fat" or "health bar" isn't enough. What should really interest you is the ingredients and the nutritional values table (sometimes it's not in the form of table but the relevant data is: caloric values, proteins, carbs and fats). Following, I would like to show the main pitfalls awaiting the standard customer.

How many times have you seen products with "Low fat" written on them? What does this label mean? Well, there is no exact definition to "Low fat". Manufacturers decide upon the definition of low fat according to their marketing purposes. Thus, in order to discover the real fat percentage you'll need to read nutritional values. In general, below five percent fat is considered low fat by many food-producing companies.

Health bars became popular over the last years. If you compare nutritional values of "health bars" with regular ones, in most cases, you'll find them resembling. Health bars are usually more expensive than their not so famous siblings. If nutritional values are the same, than you can buy regular bars and save money.

On many products you can see the following phrase: "only x calories per serving". This doesn't automatically mean that this product is appropriate for dieting. Check the small letters, what's meant by serving. Usually, a cornflakes serving is considered as 30 grams. I don't think that many people eat only 30 grams of cornflakes! Also, some food companies don't write the nutritional values per 100 gram of product, but for another, usually smaller amount. One hundred grams is the standard amount and you can use it to compare between products.

Not all products come ready-to-eat. In such cases, you can check the meaning of caloric values. Do they refer for the product as is? Or cooked in water? Or prepared in some other way?

I hope that after reading this article you'll get the habit of reading food labels and especially the small letters.