BarcelonaChoosing between the multitude of similar products offered by a supermarket has become almost an escape room. The options for basic foods such as bread or milk have multiplied, the range is increasingly wide, and deciding can sometimes be complicated. A good way to tip the scales one way or the other is to look at the labels of different products, compare them, and choose the one that best fits each person's nutritional needs. However, interpreting them is not always easy, as processed foods include a long list of ingredients, some of which are additives associated with a number or a technical name, and it is complicated to separate the wheat from the chaff. ARA has consulted various experts in nutrition and endocrinology to create an easy guide that allows understanding food labels and leaving the supermarket with the conviction of having chosen the best option.
The first thing to know is that the front of the vast majority of processed products is "marketing" and that one must read the back, where the ingredients are, to know for sure the components of a processed food, explains Àlex Blasco, a dietitian-nutritionist at Sant Pau Hospital. Thus, even if the packaging promises that a food is low in salt, rich in fiber, organic, natural, or homemade, the label must be read, as these are "claims" that can lead to wrong interpretations, maintains this expert, who is also a member of the governing board of the College of Dietitians-Nutritionists of Catalonia.
Labels have three main functions: the first is to inform about which ingredients a food contains; the second is to protect the consumer from poisoning and allergic reactions with the list of allergens, the expiration date or the best-before date, and the last is for choice, as it allows you to compare similar products and choose the one that best fits each person's needs. In Europe, the nutritional table must mandatorily include the energy value, fats, saturated fats, carbohydrates, sugars, proteins, and salt. "By law, they are arranged in descending order; the ingredient with the most presence is the one that comes first, and they go from most to least," explains Blasco.
The information must be referenced per 100 grams, that is to say, what percentage of each of these ingredients is in 100 grams of each product, so they can be compared, as detailed by Montse Villatoro, nutritionist at the Endocrinology and Nutrition Service of the Hospital del Mar. Before comparing products, however, the most important thing is to look at the food denomination that is just before the list of ingredients and which will allow us to know exactly what that product in question is. For example, many brands that advertise themselves as grated cheese on the packaging are actually a dairy preparation for melting or gratinating, and this can only be known by consulting the food denomination that is just before the ingredients, explains Blasco.
Additives
One of the elements that generates the most doubt is additives, those ingredients identified by the letter E and a number. "We have demonized them, as if they were all bad, when in reality it is just the system to identify additives in the European Union," asserts Villatoro. Before being used, their safety is evaluated and, although some can be synthesized, many correspond to natural substances. For example, E-300 is vitamin C; E-440 are pectins (fruit fibers that give consistency to a product); E-322 are lecithins, an emulsifier that is generally extracted from soy or egg, and E-160 is lycopene, an antioxidant from tomatoes used for the preservation of products.
For his part, Blasco attributes this rejection to the "chemophobia" that has taken hold based on certain discourses about healthy and organic food. In this sense, the expert remarks that all permitted additives are safe and are validated by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). In fact, in many cases they are completely essential to be able to obtain certain food products. The only exception of caution that Villatoro makes is for people who suffer from digestive problems or multiple allergies, since there are additives such as nitrates and nitrites (from E-249 to E-252) present in processed meats, monosodium glutamate (E-621), certain artificial colorings, or sulfites (from E-220 to E-228) that, despite being fully authorized, can cause them problems.
Ultra-processed
Experts warn that where one must be vigilant is with ultra-processed foods, and here the nutritional label is the best tool to detect them. According to Villatoro, the main warning signs are very long ingredient lists, the presence of unrecognizable ingredients, multiple additives, the use of refined oils, and the use of syrups. They tend to be products with excess salt, unhealthy fats, and many sugars. Here, it is essential to know how to differentiate between sugars naturally present in a food—such as lactose in milk or fructose in fruit—and added sugars such as sucrose or syrups.
Ultra-processed foods are products manufactured by the food industry, often with very little raw material, containing four or more ingredients that we would never or very rarely find in a kitchen. There is increasingly more scientific evidence that the consumption of these foods is detrimental to human health: it harms each and every organ of our body and is linked to the current epidemic of chronic diseases, such as obesity, overweight, and type 2 diabetes; also heart disease, cancer, and depression. Although there is no data on how many ultra-processed foods we consume in Catalonia, it is estimated that in Europe and the United States they represent between 25% and 60% of the energy intake of the diet.
These include sugary and energy drinks, pastries, industrial sliced bread, cookies and sugary breakfast cereals, potato chips and similar products, flavored yogurts, junk food, snacks, processed meats, industrial dairy products, and pre-cooked dishes, among others. They all have very intense flavors, attractive packaging and wrapping, are easy and quick to consume, last a long time in the pantry without spoiling, and are usually promoted by very powerful advertising campaigns, especially aimed at children and adolescents.
Other tools
Apart from labels, the packaging of some packaged products sold in supermarkets features the Nutri-Score, a labeling system that complements the classic nutritional table. It is very easy to identify because it appears on the front of the food and is presented with a scale of eye-catching colors that may remind one of a traffic light. Since 2017, different European countries have progressively adopted it, and it responds to the WHO guideline to promote healthy environments. It uses a letter logo (from A to E), and each one is associated with a different color: dark green, light green, yellow, orange, and red. The greener the product label, the healthier it is, and the redder it is, the less healthy.
There are also digital tools to evaluate an ingredient. The rise in interest in healthy eating has popularized the use of mobile applications that scan barcodes to judge the quality of a product. However, Blasco believes that they can often be counterproductive due to their alarmist nature. "Sometimes so much information ends up overwhelming them, and with such dichotomous messages, we get lost in the shades of gray and people fail," he warns. Many of these applications automatically categorize a product as harmful just for including a safe and authorized additive. "We don't all need to be nutritionists to interpret labels if we know where to look," asserts the expert, who insists that the essential thing is not to get carried away by claims and to focus on the information on the labels, now that we know how to interpret them.