Nutritional facts

The nutritional facts label (also known as the nutrition information panel, and various other slight variations) is required on most pre-packaged foods in North America, United Kingdomand other countries.

United States

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In the U.S., the nutritional facts label lists the percentage supplied required in one day of human nutrients. In certain cases this label is not yet required by law, so a list of ingredients should be present instead. Ingredients are listed in order of most common to least common.

The label begins with a standard servingmeasurement, caloriesare listed second, and then following is a break down of the constituent elements. Always listed are fat, carbohydratesand protein, then usually cholesteroland sodium, and then sometimes vitaminsand minerals(trace elements).

Products that claim to be classified as low-fatand high-fibermust achieve uniform definitions between products of similar labels.

United Kingdom

In Britain, the panel is most often labelled "Nutrition Information". It will always give values for a set quantity (usually 100g or 100ml as appropriate) of the product, and often also for a defined "serving". First will come the energy values, in both Calories and kilojoules, although the metric measurement is still little used by the general public.

Then will come a breakdown of constituent elements: usually most or all of protein, carbohydrate, starch, sugar, fat, fibre and sodium. The "fat" figure is likely to be further broken down into saturatedand unsaturated fat, while the "carbohydrate" figure is likely to give a subtotal for sugars.

For most foods, there are no specific legal definitions of terms such as "low fat" or "high fibre", although spreadable fats (eg butterand margarine) do have statutory requirements for the quantity of fat they contain. However, terms such as "reduced calorie" may not be used unless they can be shown to be considerably lower in calories than the "usual" version of the product.

References

• U.S. Food and Drug Administration - U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
• Health Canada Nutrition Labeling
• Food Standards Agency (UK) - "What do labels tell me?"

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutritional+facts Wikipedia article Nutritional facts.