In 1990, the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act went into effect. The USDA and the FDA designed the requirements so that consumers would have useful information about the food they eat. But how do you make sense of a food label?

According to the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, all food labels must contain the following information:

• Common name of the product
• Name and address of the product’s manufacturer
• Net contents in terms of weight, measure or count, and:

Ingredient List – Lists the ingredients in descending order of predominance and weight. In Krispy Krunchies, the ingredients are listed at the bottom of the label. As you can see, the predominant ingredient is corn, next is oil, then cheese, etc.

Serving Sizes – Each package must identify the size of a serving. In Krispy Krunchies, one package contains one serving. The nutritional information given on the label is based on one serving of the food.

Nutrition Facts – each package must identify the quantities of specified nutrients and food constituents for one serving. From this information, you can gleam some very useful information. The most important thing to remember is this:

• 1 gr. fat = 9 calories
• 1 gr. protein = 4 calories
• 1 gr. carbohydrate = 4 calories
• 1 gr. alcohol = 7 calories

Therefore, we can tell the percentages of each nutrient in Krispie Krunchies:

Graphically, the components look like this pie chart. Note that this food is not a very healthy choice because of its high fat content.	Additionally, we can tell that of the 10 grams of total carbohydrate, 1 gram (10%) comes from simple sugars, rather than from complex carbohydrates.
Furthermore, we can tell that of the 4 total grams of fat, 0.5 grams (or 11%) is saturated fat -- the fat we would like to avoid.

The "*% Daily Values" section provides an estimate of the percentage of total nutrients that one serving of Krispy Krunchies provides. For example, if you were consuming 2000 calories per day, one serving of Krispie Krunchies would provide 6% of the recommended day’s allotment of fat (4 grams out of a total 65 grams allotted), and 3% of the recommended day's allotment of carbohydrate (10 grams out of a total 300 grams allotted).

The "Calories From Fat" is also instructive for a quick estimate of a product’s fat content. We can see that one serving of Krispie Krunchies contains a total of 80 calories –35 of the calories are from fat. That means that 35 calories out of a total of 80 calories, or approximately 45% of Krispie Krunchies’ calories, come from fat. If you looked at the ingredient list, you could tell that oil is listed as the ^2nd ingredient, which confirms that fat is a very large component of this food product.

FDA Specifications for Health Claims and Descriptive Terms

The FDA also provides guidelines about the claims and descriptions manufacturers may use in food labeling to promote their products:

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