Wish your kids understood what was in the food they eat? Here’s a tutorial on reading nutrition labels from the voice of healthy kids cooking, elementary teacher, and mom of 4. Grab your kids to watch this video which was made just for them!
They’ll learn:
- How to read an ingredients list including those pesky parentheses
- What a calorie is and why we ignore them
- The difference between fat, carbohydrates, and protein calories
- How to remember all the different kinds of fat, which ones we should eat and avoid (careful, you might learn something too!)
- Which ingredient is always bad for us, and all the sneaky ways it hides
- A quick guide to the newer nutrition labels that split out added sugars, and how to interpret those
Reading Nutrition Labels Worksheet
Take notes and remember what you learn! Print the worksheet out for your kids here.
Can’t see the video? Click to watch “Reading Nutrition Labels for Kids Part 1” on YouTube.
No time for the video? Here are the notes!
Reading Nutrition Food Labels for Kids
- 0:50: The first thing to understand is that the ingredients are listed in the order of the amount that they are in the recipe. For example, if tomato puree is the first ingredient on a tomato sauce jar, that means there’s more tomato puree than anything else in the sauce.
- 1:48: Sometimes an ingredient has other ingredients! For example, if you buy chocolate chip cookies, chocolate chips are an ingredient themselves and they are made up of other ingredients. When that happens, the ingredients are in parenthesis.
- In this case, the tomato puree has three ingredients. Citric acid is a tiny ingredient inside the tomato puree. Even though citric acid is in front of onions, that doesn’t mean there’s more of it. There’s just more tomato puree than onions.
Would Your Kids Make Better Food Choices If They Understood Nutrition Labels?
Download my free worksheet to teach your kids to read nutrition labels:
What Is in a Calorie?
- 3:11: Do you know what a calorie is? It’s a unit of energy. Everything we do with our bodies is fueled by the energy we get from calories. There are different kinds of calories: fat, carbs, and protein. Different types of foods have different calorie measurements.
- 4:02: The number of calories is the first big number on most nutrition labels, so that makes it seem really important. But it isn’t that big of a deal! Your body uses different types of calories in different ways and the number isn’t the most important thing.
Reading Nutrition Labels: Finding Healthy Fats
- 4:27: The type of fat you’re putting in your body really matters. Labels usually show total fat, saturated fat, and trans fat.
- 4:48: Saturated fat can be good or bad. It’s important to know the source. S=Saturated=Sometimes, Source important.
- 4:54: Trans fat is always terrible for you! T=Trans=Terrible! You always want to look for 0 grams of trans fat. Trans fat is made by humans in labs and your body doesn’t really know what to do with it.
- 5:43: Unsaturated fat is divided into monounsaturated fat and polyunsaturated fat. Monounsaturated fats are always good for you. M=Mono=for Me! Polyunsaturated fat is not as bad as trans fat, but it’s still not great for you. P=Poly=Problem. If there’s some polyunsaturated fat, but more monounsaturated fat then that’s ok.
- 7:17: We want Mono to be the Most cause it’s good for Me. Poly can be a Problem so we want to Pare it down. With Saturated fat we want to See the Source.
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- 7:33: So what are some good sources of fat? Extra virgin olive oil, grass-fed butter, palm shortening, avocados or avocado oil, coconut oil, beef tallow, or bacon grease.
- 8:07: There are lots of inflammatory fats on ingredient labels. The more processing we do to get an oil, the worse it is for your body. We call these industrial oils. Some examples are corn oil, cottonseed oil, soybean oil, canola oil, and vegetable oil.
- 9:07: Safflower and Sunflower oils are ok sometimes. They are better than the industrial oils mentioned above, but they shouldn’t make up the majority of your fat intake.
Find that Sneaky Sugar on Nutrition Labels
- 10:11: Sugar is always bad for you! There are many different sources of sugar and again, the more processed it is, the worse it is for your body.
- 10:39: When reading the ingredient labels, you want to pay attention to where the sugar is coming from. Here are some of the words you might see on a label: sugar, anything with the word “syrup” in it like high fructose corn syrup or rice syrup, honey, any word ending in -ose like dextrose, maltose, fructose, the word “juice,” the word “cane” and the word “fruit.” All these words mean added sugar.
- 11:32: It’s recommended that kids eat no more than 25 grams of added sugar per day. That’s six teaspoons. Just half a can of soda is 5 teaspoons of sugar! That’s almost all your added sugar for the day in one drink, and who only drinks half a can?!
- 12:22: Labels are now required to show the total sugar and the added sugar separately.
- 13:01: Here’s an example: In the KIND bars on the left, there are 5 grams of total sugar and 4 grams of that is from an added sweetener. In the pasta sauce on the right there are 6 grams of sugar, but 0 grams of added sugar. There’s no added sweetener, so all the sugar is naturally occurring in the tomatoes.
- 14:26: When looking at the sugar, also look at the fiber. We want there to be some fiber when there’s sugar. Fruit juice may have a lot of sugar and no fiber. Whole fruit on the other hand will have some fiber.
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Eating raisins is better than eating straight white sugar, like in a piece of candy. -Mrs. Kimball
More Resources for Reading Nutrition Labels
Be sure to check out part 2 to see how food packaging might try to trick you and don’t forget to download your kid’s nutrition label worksheet.
What You Should Do Next:
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About Katie Kimball
Katie Kimball, CSME, creator of Kids Cook Real Food™ and CEO of Kitchen Stewardship®, LLC, is passionate about connecting families around healthy food. As a trusted educator and author of 8 real food cookbooks, she’s been featured on media outlets like ABC, NBC and First for Women magazine and contributes periodically on the FOX Network.
Since 2009, busy moms have looked to Katie as a trusted authority and advocate for children’s health, and she often partners with health experts and medical practitioners to stay on the cutting edge. In 2016 she created the Wall Street Journal recommended best online kids cooking course, Kids Cook Real Food™, helping thousands of families around the world learn to cook. She is actively masterminding the Kids’ Meal Revolution, with a goal of every child learning to cook.
A mom of 4 kids from Michigan, she is also a Certified Stress Mastery Educator, member of the American Institute of Stress and trained speaker through Bo Eason’s Personal Story Power.