How to make healthy choices in the supermarket?

It is not always easy to find your way around all the labels and supermarket shelves that highlight certain products rather than others. How to make healthy choices while shopping?

77% of Belgians find it difficult to fill their shopping cart with healthy products according to a WW study. Most food products are labeled with nutritional information. But how to interpret them in the right way?

Valerie Mattheussens, a dietician at WW (formerly Weight Watchers), shares some tips here on how to correctly interpret the content of these labels.

1. Importance of portions : When comparing similar products, don’t focus on the column where the nutritional values ​​are stated “per serving”, but on the “per 100 g / ml” values. In fact, a portion can vary between 10g and 130g, you risk losing yourself in the calculations or simply making a mistake.

2. Order of ingredients : Ingredients are sorted by decreasing weight. “The ingredient listed first is therefore the one in which the product contains the most“So, if sugars are mentioned first, we can say that the food in question is very sweet.

3. “With no added sugar” : Some packages are labeled “no added sugar”, but the products in question may obviously contain natural sugars. “So make no mistake about it. Additionally, manufacturers often come up with clever names to avoid the word “sugar”. When the name of an ingredient ends in “-ose” (glucose, fructose) or that it contains the word “syrup” (date syrup, rice syrup), it can be deduced that the product contains added sugars“says Valerie.

4. Sodium or salt : Food products contain a lot of hidden salt. However, our diet is generally too high in salt, which can cause high blood pressure and kidney problems. “The culprit is the substance called sodium. Salt is 40% sodium. Preferably choose products that are low in salt or sodium“.

5. The shape must match the background : If the package shows, for example, a photo of a banana, you need to indicate the percentage of banana in the product.

6. Watch out for big claims :

   • “High in fiber”, “light”, “low in sugar”, these are claims we see on packaging every day. Don’t be fooled: “Light” or “Skinny” means that the product contains 30% less fat or sugar or calories than a comparable variant, so if the basic version is very fat, I ‘turn on’ the rest as well.

   • “Low Fat”, “Low Fat” or “Low Fat” means less than 3% fat for solid food products and less than 1.5% fat for liquid products. With the exception of low-fat milk, which contains 1.8% fat per 100ml.

   • “Fat free” or “Fat free” means that the product contains less than 0.5% fat. “Low sodium” or “low salt” means that the product contains a maximum of 0.12 grams of sodium or 0.3 grams of salt per 100 grams or 100 ml.