Your Guide to Reading Food Labels
Most grocery store foods are marketed to look healthy—not to be healthy. This makes choosing healthy options while shopping unnecessarily complicated!
This guide helps you understand what labels actually mean, what ingredients matter most, and how to make more informed choices for your diet and nutrition.
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How to Read & Understand Food Labels
For Informed, Healthy Diet Decisions
The modern food landscape is dominated by Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs)—factory-made products designed for shelf life and hyper-palatability rather than nutrition. These products often undergo extensive processing where natural fiber and minerals are removed, only to have synthetic vitamins added back in later. Furthermore, many UPFs contain common additives like BHT, Aspartame, or High-Fructose Corn Syrup, which have been linked to issues ranging from hormone disruption and gut inflammation to insulin resistance. When you rely solely on front-of-package claims, you may unknowingly consume high levels of refined carbs or inflammatory oils like canola and soybean oil.
Understanding how to read the fine print is the best way to protect your long-term wellness. Marketing terms like "Natural," "Farm Fresh," or "Multigrain" often have no legal definition or simply refer to minimal processing rather than how the food was actually grown. By learning to spot "serving size tricks" and renaming strategies for sugar—such as maltodextrin or cane juice—you can avoid the hidden traps that impact metabolism and gut health. Mastering these labels allows you to choose foods based on their actual quality rather than their visual appeal, ensuring that what you put in your cart aligns with your foundational health goals.
In this guide we’ll cover:
The top 8 unregulated food buzzwords and what they mean
How to see-through misleading food packaging and marketing
How ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are made
A color-coded guide for the most common additives to avoid in processed food
Here’s a sneak peak at what’s in the guide!