Nutritional labelling: Don't scare, but sensitise

How do you then bring about better nutrition consciousness in a society that is quite apathetic to excess consumption of salt, sugar and fats?

My colleague was crunching through a big bag of potato chips. When I tried cautioning him, he pooh-poohed saying he had studied the nutrition label and the chips were moderate in calorie content. I had to get him to interpret the table better by looking at the “per-serving” numbers and the “total pack” numbers. Then the penny dropped.

Nutrition labels give two kinds of information, nutrition facts and ingredients. Nutrition facts show us the amount of fat, cholesterol, sodium, calories, sugar, protein, minerals, vitamins etc. The plot gets thicker when we see that there may be three tables presented: total content