The food shopping card can help you see how sugary your food is and allows you to pick options that are lower in sugar. The “per 100g” value helps you to compare different foods.
Food labelling
You can learn a lot about food by looking at the food label. The food label contains a lot of information and can sometimes be confusing.
Food shopping card
Food shopping card
Worked example - cereal bar
To check how sugary a cereal bar is we would look at the “per 100g” value and compare this to the Food Shopping Card.
From this food label you can tell that this cereal bar has 13.5g of sugar per 100g and is therefore has a medium amount of sugar.
It is okay to have a variety of meals which are a mixture of low and medium amounts of sugar but try to limit the amount of foods you have that are high in sugar and use these as a treat. Aim to have foods that contain a low amount of sugar using the food shopping card above.
Snacks with no insulin
The cereal bar has a medium amount of sugar in it but you want to check how much total carbohydrate it contains to see if it can be used as a snack. To do this you want to know how much carbohydrate there is in each bar and you can check this using the food label.
You can see from the food label that there is 11.8g of total carbohydrate in the cereal bar and therefore it is suitable for having as a snack (because it has less than 15g of carbohydrate).
