This is part of our series on packs: how to read them, what to trust, and what to take with a cautionary eye. Last time we were on the health star rating, which hands you a score somebody else calculated. The ingredient list gives you the raw material to judge for yourself.
Most of us never read it. That is completely reasonable. It is small, it is on the back, and it looks like a wall of text with no obvious way in.
So here is how I would talk you through it if you were sitting across from me, starting from scratch.
You do not have to read all of it
Ingredients are listed by weight, heaviest first. That is a legal requirement, not a convention, and it is the single most useful thing to know about a label.
So the first three or four ingredients are the bulk of what is in your hand. Everything after that is present in progressively smaller amounts.
Five seconds of reading, and you know what the product mostly is.
Question one: is sugar near the top?
This is the first thing I look for, and it is the one that takes the most practice, because sugar goes by a great many names.
Here is the full list to keep an eye out for.
The obvious ones:
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Sugar, cane sugar, raw sugar, caster sugar, brown sugar, icing sugar
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Sucrose, glucose, fructose, dextrose, maltose, lactose
The syrups:
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Glucose syrup, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, golden syrup
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Rice malt syrup, brown rice syrup, barley malt syrup, malt extract
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Maple syrup, agave syrup or nectar, treacle, molasses, honey
The ones that sound like something else:
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Fruit juice concentrate, reconstituted fruit juice, deionised fruit juice, fruit syrup
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Coconut sugar, palm sugar, panela, muscovado, demerara, turbinado, rapadura
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Invert sugar, invert syrup, caramel
That third group is where people get caught. Concentrated apple or grape juice used as a sweetener is doing the same job as sugar, and calling it juice does not change what it is. Coconut sugar and rapadura are sold as the wholesome option, and nutritionally they are close enough to ordinary sugar that the distinction does not matter much.
How to spot a product using three at once
This is the part worth understanding, because it is where the weight order rule can mislead you.
Each of those names is a separate ingredient, so each one gets weighed separately. A product using glucose syrup, honey and fruit juice concentrate has three entries scattered down the list, and none of them needs to appear in the top few, even though added together they might outweigh everything else.
That is not sneaky. It is how ingredient lists work, and there is no rule requiring sugars to be grouped.
So when you scan a list, do not just look at position. Look for repeats. Two or three names from the lists above, spread across a list, should be mentally added together.
Then check the panel. The total sugars figure counts every one of them together, naturally occurring and added, no matter how many names they arrived under. The list tells you what is in there. The panel tells you how much.
One that is not a sugar, but behaves like one
Maltodextrin is worth knowing about separately. It is made from starch, and because of its chemical structure it does not appear in the sugars line of the nutrition panel at all. It is counted as carbohydrate.
But it is rapidly digested, and it can raise blood glucose as fast as sugar does. So a product can be low in sugars on the panel and still be built largely on maltodextrin. It is the one case where the ingredient list tells you something the panel does not.
Question two: where is the hero ingredient?
If the front of the pack is boasting about blueberries, find the blueberries in the list.
If they turn up near the end, behind the oil and the sugar, you have your answer without needing a single number. Nothing more needed.
Worth knowing there is a rule that helps you here. If an ingredient is named in the product name or emphasised on the front of the pack, including in a photograph, the amount has to be declared as a percentage. That is why you see things like apples (26%) sitting partway through a list. That number is not the manufacturer being generous, it is a requirement.
Question three: what is this giving me?
My favourite question, and the one worth taking away from all of this.
Not is it good or bad, which is rarely a useful question and usually an unanswerable one. Just: what am I getting here?
Look at the top few ingredients and see whether anything in there is feeding you. Wholegrains, legumes, nuts and seeds, real fruit or vegetables, a protein source. Or is it mostly refined flour, an oil and something sweet?
Ask that of anything and you will get further than the front of the pack will take you.
One caveat before you go too hard with this
Weight order tells you proportion. It does not tell you whether something is present in a useful amount.
Vitamins and minerals are dosed in milligrams and micrograms, so they sit at the bottom of every list no matter how much they contribute. A nutrient can be a fraction of a percent of a product by weight and still cover most of a day's requirement.
So weight order is a good signal for foods built out of bulk ingredients like flour, sugar, oil and fruit. For a micronutrient, the nutrition panel is what tells you.
Try it this week: three packets, three ingredients
Pick up three things from your kitchen and read the first three ingredients of each.
Go for the everyday ones rather than the obvious suspects. The biscuits are not going to surprise anybody. The interesting ones are the things you buy every week and have never turned over: the bread, the crackers, the simmer sauce, the muesli, the yoghurt.
Then ask question three. What is this giving me?
You are not looking for anything to be wrong. Most of the time you will find something perfectly reasonable and carry on exactly as you were. Now and then the answer will surprise you, and that is the one worth knowing about.
The takeaway: Read the first three ingredients, not all of them. Check whether sugar is near the top, and whether it appears under several names at once. Find the ingredient the front of the pack is selling and see where it lands. Then ask what the product is actually giving you. Weight order tells you proportion, not adequacy, so use the panel for anything dosed in milligrams.
The science behind this post:
- Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, Standard 1.2.4: Information requirements relating to food identification. Ingredients must be listed in descending order of ingoing weight. foodstandards.gov.au
- Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, Standard 1.2.10: Information requirements relating to characterising ingredients and components of food. A percentage declaration is required where an ingredient is named in the food name or emphasised on the label, including through pictures or graphics. foodstandards.gov.au
- Food Standards Australia New Zealand. Added sugars: sugars may be declared under many ingredient names including glucose syrup, dextrose, maltodextrin, rice malt syrup, invert sugar, fruit juice concentrate and reconstituted fruit juice. foodstandards.gov.au
- Food Standards Australia New Zealand. Sugar labelling. Total sugars in the nutrition information panel include both naturally occurring and added sugars, across all ingredient sources. foodstandards.gov.au
- Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, Standard 1.2.8: Nutrition information requirements. Maltodextrin is declared within total carbohydrate rather than within sugars. foodstandards.gov.au