Label Reading
Apps to help know if products are healthy:
- Bobby Approved
- Yuka
Ideal for a product to have 5 ingredients or less.
Ideally the ingredients are natural foods (words you can recognize).
Ingredients to avoid:
Artificial sweeteners:
- Aspartame
- Glucose syrup
- Invert sugar syrup
- Maltitol
- Splenda (also called sucralose)
- High fructose corn syrup
Preservatives:
- Benzoate
- BHT
- Diglyceride
- EDTA
- Maltodextrin
- Monoglyceride
- Potassium metabisulfite
- Potassium sorbate
- Sodium benzoate
- Sodium bisulfite
- Sodium metabisulfite
- Sodium nitrite
- Sodium phosphate
- TBHQ
- Trisodium citrate
Processed and refined grain:
- Bleached flour
- Enriched flour
- Bromate (chemical added to flour)
Food coloring:
- Blue #1 and # 2
- Caramel color
- Green #3
- Red #3 and #40
- Yellow #5 and #6
Processed oils:
- Canola
- Corn oil
- Cottonseed oil
- Grapeseed oil
- Hydrogenated anything
- Palm fruit
- Palm kernel
- Palm oil
- Peanut oil
- Rapeseed oil
- Rice bran oil
- Safflower oil
- Sesame oil
- Soybean oil
- Sunflower oil
- Sunflower seed oil
- Vegetable oil
Carrageenan (emulsifier)
Corn syrup (highly processed sugar from GMO corn)
Refined sugar:
- Dextrose
- Fructose
- Sorbitol
MSG: monosodium glutamate (also called disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate, malt extract)
Natural or Artificial Flavors (unregulated term)
Hydrolyzed soy protein
Emulsifiers:
- Polysorbate 60
- Polysorbate 80
- Propylene glycol alginate
