Reading Food Labels: Helping Your Teens Make Healthy Food Choices

Our teens today face an uphill battle when learning to navigate the food choices available to them. Grocery and convenience stores, snack bars and vending machines are packed with unhealthy, ultra-processed foods (UPF) and food product advertising is everywhere they turn. Social pressures and low costs also influence their choices. Consistently consuming these nutrient-deficient, highly processed foods can significantly impact their health and well-being. How can we help our kids learn how to make smarter food choices? Encouraging our kids to understand food labels is an important skill to start with. But first, it may be helpful for them to understand the “why?”

Why check food labels

There is an abundance of research showing the negative effects of ultra-processed foods on our health. The process of making foods shelf-stable requires excessively heating, adding preservatives or altering foods in other ways to prolong their life. Additives and dyes are added to make foods look more appealing to kids, as well as taste better, drawing consumers back for more. Yet by the time these “foods” are consumed they are far from their natural state and they cause a lot of damage to the body. Particularly relevant to our teens, there is a growing body of research showing associations between UPF and mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety and ADHD.

Teaching teens to understand food labels helps them make healthy choices and avoid over-processed, nutrient- deficient foods.

Taking a deeper look at food labels

Understanding food labels can reveal important information about the quality of the food product. Here are some tips to share with your teens when considering food choices:

Look at the ingredient list. Ingredients are listed in descending order, so the ingredients listed first are the majority of its contents. If the first ingredients are sugar, corn syrup or anything other than a recognizable whole food such as nuts, oats, cacao or chicken, then make a different choice.

Note the number of ingredients. Fewer is usually better. For example, Kraft Mac and Cheese contains 23 ingredients compared with Annie’s Organic Shells and White Cheddar, which contains only 8 ingredients. Often nutrients such as thiamin or riboflavin (B vitamins) are added to the food creating a longer ingredient list. If you see a long list of vitamins added, it can reveal that the main ingredients have minimal nutritional value by themselves and that the product is highly processed.

Stay away from unrecognizable ingredients such as titanium dioxide, polysorbate 80, monosodium glutamate, modified food starch. If it sounds like something you would find in a chemistry book, it is likely altered physically, enzymatically or chemically and has damaging effects to our bodies. The Environmental Working Group (EWG.org) has a downloadable guide called the Dirty Dozen Guide to Food Chemicals that can be a great place to start.

Avoid artificial food dyes. Artificial food dyes have been linked to cancer, behavioral problems and other health issues. Beware; since food dyes have gained bad publicity, they have now been re-named. Look for words such as beta-carotene, caramel, anatto and curcumin. If the food item is brightly and unnaturally colored, then it likely contains food dyes. On Jan.15 of this year, the US Food and Drug Administration officially revoked its authorization of Red Dye No. 3  also known as FD&C Red No. 3, erythrosine or Red 3, a widely used food coloring that has been under scrutiny for decades as a possible carcinogen. Although the Food and Drug Administration authorization was revoked, companies have years to change how they make their products, so this carcinogenic substance may be an ingredient in foods for a while.

Beware of artificial and “natural” flavors. Artificial flavors are made from petroleum and other inedible chemicals. Natural flavors are molecular replicas of natural food sources that have been chemically formulated in a lab to taste a certain way. They are far from “natural” and they are created with a purpose; to promote addicting habits.

Avoid ingredients such as canola, corn, cottonseed, soybean and vegetable oils. These oils are highly processed, chemically treated and often genetically modified and they lead to oxidative stress and inflammation in the body.

With some practice, reading food labels will get easier and soon enough a quick glance will give you a sense of the quality of the product. Health-conscious brands will become more familiar and trustworthy to you. There are several mobile apps such as Yuka that may be helpful to you and your kids. And finally, don’t forget to model healthy eating to your children. Taking a family approach to healthy eating will benefit your children most.