How to read a food ingredient label
You do not need a chemistry degree to get useful information off a label. Two habits do most of the work: read the order, and learn to spot the additives. Here is how.
The order is a ranking
By law, ingredients are listed by weight, heaviest first. That single rule tells you a lot. The first two or three ingredients are the bulk of what you are eating, and everything after drops off from there. If a biscuit lists sugar first, it is mostly sugar, whatever the front of the pack says. Reading just the top of the list is often enough to compare two products.
Spotting the additives
Additives tend to sit toward the end of the list, and they come in two forms. Some show up as an E-number, like E621 or E150d. Others appear as a job followed by the substance in brackets, such as “preservative (sodium nitrite)”. The job word tells you what it does; the name or number tells you which one it is. Once you can pick these out, the label stops being a wall of text.
What the long names and numbers mean
The cryptic part is usually the additives, and each E-number maps to a specific substance with a known safety profile. E300 is vitamin C. E621 is MSG. E150d is a caramel colour. You do not have to memorise them. You can look any of them up in our additive directory, which explains each one and rates it, or scan the barcode and let the app decode the whole list for you.
A quick word on sugar and salt
Sugar and salt are worth watching, but they are a question of quantity, not a hazardous additive. The place to judge them is the nutrition panel, in grams, not the additive list. An ingredient list tells you what is in a product; the nutrition table tells you how much.