You’ve mastered the art of coupon clipping, comparison shopping, and bargain hunting when it comes to buying groceries for your family. You know how to buy in bulk, make a week’s worth of meals ahead of time, and plan out menus for the entire month. It seems like you have almost perfected how to plan, budget, shop, and prepare meals that suit your family’s busy schedule.

However, there’s still one part of this process that sometimes confuses you. You know how to get the best monetary value for your groceries, but how can you make certain you are also getting the best nutritional value? Food labels can be confusing. Below, Dr. Nathen Horst walks you through the various parts of a standard food label to help you become savvy about both nutritional and price values.

Serving Size

When you look at a food nutrition facts label, you will see that the serving size and the number of servings are both listed first. In some cases, one serving will be equivalent to the package or container of food, such as for an individually sized cup of yogurt. However, this may not always be the case. For example, if you buy a box of crackers, the label may say that a single serving consists of four crackers. So if you eat eight crackers, you have consumed two servings. Since all of the other values on the nutrition label are based on one serving size, you will need to double each value. If one serving of crackers contains 100 calories, two servings will have 200 calories.

Calories/Calories from Fat

Calories are a unit of measurement for how much energy you get from food. In the case of our box of crackers, this part of the food label tells you how much energy you get from one serving (four crackers). This section is further broken down by telling you how many of those calories come from fat. If one serving contains 100 calories, and 10 of those calories came from fat, it would be reasonable to say those crackers were low in fat. On the other hand, those crackers would be high in fat if one serving contained 40 calories that came from fat.

Nutrients

Next on the nutritional label are the nutrients. The first list of nutrients are those that you want to limit, such as fat, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, and sodium. The next list contains nutrients that are beneficial, including dietary fiber, vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, and iron.

Footnote

This bottom section of the label contains the percentage of the daily value (% DV) for nutrients, based on a 2,000 calorie per day diet. Each % DV is based on the stipulation of 100% of the daily requirements for that nutrient. This can allow you to compare similar items in terms of which has a greater percentage of good nutritional value toward those 2,000 calories per day. For example, one brand of yogurt might have a higher % DV of vitamin C than another because it contains fruit. However, it may also have a higher % DV of fat. In this case, you can have a base of comparison to determine the nutritional trade off of one brand versus another.

You can think of the information contained on a food information label as similar to its price label. Both provide you with important information as to whether or not the item has good value for your family. The price tells you if it has good monetary value, while the food label tells you if it has good nutritional value.