What I Look For in Every Ingredients List (And Why You Should Too)

Do not be fooled into buying gluten-free stuff thinking that, "Oh, this is a healthy food. Oh, this gluten-free cupcake is super good for me." No, no, no.

Hello angels, and welcome back to the glucose goddess show. I'm Jessie Inchauspé, a French biochemist. And I want you to understand your health and your body so you can feel really well. And I also want you to know how to navigate the very complicated, confusing food landscape that we live in today. Like when we go to the grocery store, it's complicated. We're not sure what's healthy, what's not healthy. When we turn the packet over, we're not sure what to look at to make the right choice. So today I'm going to give you all of my top tips to be able to understand really really well what the back of a package hides from you so you can pick the right stuff for you and your family. So let's get started.

The first thing you need to know is that when you look at the packaging and you turn it over, the list of ingredients is a really good place to start looking. And in the list of ingredients, you should know that the ingredients are ordered by weight. So the earlier in the list an ingredient is, the more quantity of that ingredient in the food. For example, if the ingredients list says, I don't know, um, sugar, apple juice, and what could be a random thing? And high fructose corn syrup. If that's the ingredients list, the sugar is going to be the one present in the highest quantity, then the apple juice, and then in a smaller quantity, the high fructose corn syrup. So, it goes in descending order.

Now, here's my first tip. If sugar is in the first five ingredients on the ingredients list, the food you're looking at is dessert. I don't care if it says breakfast cereal. I don't care if it says it's a healthy protein bar. There's going to be so much sugar in that product that it's not going to be so good for you. And you can totally buy it. You should just know that's a dessert. That's not something that I should be having first thing in the morning or on an empty stomach.

Now, here's where it gets complicated. Food manufacturers use many different names to say sugar. They don't just say sugar. There's a long, long list of ingredients that don't sound like sugar, but that is sugar. I'm going to give you a few small examples here, and then you can download the PDF in this episode. You can download it in the description below. It's going to give you all the names of sugar and also all the other tips that we're going to talk about in the rest of this episode.

So, a few examples of the many names of sugar on an ingredient list. Agave nectar, cane sugar, caramel, corn syrup, evaporated cane juice, fruit juice, galactose, glucose, golden sugar, golden syrup, honey, icing sugar, maltodextrin, maltose, maple syrup, panela sugar, rice syrup, sucrose, turbinado sugar. There are many, many names here.

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And one special mention goes for fruit juice, fruit juice concentrate, fruit puree concentrate, and pressed fruit. These are names of ingredients that you might find in an ingredients list. And the thing is, because it says fruit in them, they sound healthy, right? They sound like they're good for you. But actually, they are just sugar. Because sugar is sugar, no matter the source that it came from. So if to make a product a manufacturer has extracted sugar from say I don't know strawberries thrown away all the fiber in the water in the strawberries extracted the sugar concentrated in concentrated it sorry and put that in their fruit product. It's exactly the same thing as if they had taken just plain table sugar. These names can be confusing but if you see something with fruit in the ingredients list it's going to be sugar.

So let me give you an example. What I'm pulling up right now is the ingredients list of a fruit smoothie. I'll read them out, too. Half a pressed apple, half a crushed peach, 13 pressed grapes, 11 crushed raspberries, and a dash of lemon juice. Now, these first four ingredients are just sugar because fruit juice is just sugar.

So, that's the first tip. Look at the ingredients list. If sugar is in the top five ingredients, it's going to be dessert. It's fine to have it, but it is dessert. And also remember, sugar can come in many different names. You have to be a detective and know how to spot it. But it gets easier as you get some practice. And if you see anything that's like a fruit puree, fruit juice concentrate, that is also sugar. So remember, if it's there, it comes from fruit and it's in the top five ingredients, that food is dessert.

Okay. Next, what do we look at? We look at the nutrition facts on the back of a packaging. Now, the good thing about the nutrition facts is that there's not much hiding that anybody can do here. These are facts. There's some edge cases where some sugars can be categorized as fibers, but for our purposes, this is the place where you'll find the most truth.

So, one thing about serving sizes, sometimes manufacturers will make their serving sizes very, very small so that in the nutrition facts it doesn't look so bad. So for example, you might see a cookie box and the serving size might be one cookie, but like who just eats one cookie? So you should not look at these numbers and the calories, etc. based on their serving size. What we should be looking at is the ratio of different lines of this table to each other. This is what holds the objective evidence that you want to get really good at deciphering.

So skip right past the calories line. Actually, that's the next thing you should do. Don't look at calories because two foods can have the exact same number of calories but have vastly different molecules in them and vastly different impacts on our health. For example, an avocado and a donut can have the same number of calories. But the avocado is going to help your health, keep you feeling full, satiated, encourage your body to burn fat for fuel, and the donut is going to make you sick and inflamed and have glucose spikes and cravings.

So, calories, even though I know it's the biggest number on the box, calories are not what you should be looking at. If you take away anything from today's episode, this is kind of the most important point. The calories line should be ignored. I'm going to teach you how to get down to the details where the truth actually lies.

So, the first place to look is the total carbohydrates line. Then, the second place to look is the dietary fibers line. And I want you to find products that are going to be as close as possible to having for each five grams of carbs at least one gram of fiber. Why? Because that's a ratio we find in nature in most fruits. For example, for every five grams of carbs, there's at least one gram of fiber. And this is good because carbs are starches and sugars. They turn to glucose when we digest them. They create glucose spikes. And fibers are protective.

So the more grams of fiber you have for each five grams of carbs, the smaller the glucose spike in that food. So let's say you're trying to buy some cereal and you want to compare two cereal boxes to see which one is going to be better for you. So let's look at the nutrition facts. We have cereal number one, 25 grams of total carbohydrates and 14 grams of dietary fiber. So for every five grams of carbs, there's about three grams of fiber. This is a really good ratio.

Now, if we look at cereal number two, we have the same amount of carbs in there, but the dietary fiber is much much lower. And all of the other stuff in the nutrition facts are pretty equal. So, really, this is a really good comparison. But, as you can see in cereal number two, there's not even one gram of fiber for each 5 g of carbs. There's less than that. So, cereal number one is a much better option for your health and for your glucose levels.

Now, if this seems complicated and you're not sure about how to do the ratios and stuff, download the PDF in the description of this episode. I will go step by step about how you do it. You can even take out your, you know, your calculator on your phone and just calculate on the go. I explain to you exactly what to do so you get to that ratio and you are able to compare two boxes of cereal, of any other dried goods like some cookies, some bread, some crackers and see which ones are going to cause a smaller glucose spike.

Now, another thing to look at, of course, is the amount of protein in a product. So, here you look at the protein line. And the higher the protein, the better essentially because protein is good for us. It keeps us satiated. It reduces our glucose spikes. It builds our muscles. It gives our body the amino acids that it desperately needs to stay alive and to thrive. So, protein is really important. The higher the better.

So, that's basically what I do when I look at a food package. First of all, I look at the ingredients. If there's sugar in the top five ingredients, I'm like, that's dessert. And then I compare different products, looking at the ratio of total carbs to fiber. And I look at protein, too. So, if I'm looking for a cereal bar, if I'm looking for some bread, some cookies, some crackers, any dry foods, this is a really, really good technique to have an ingredients list and carb to fiber ratio.

Now, the next thing I want to cover, which is so important, is the marketing tactics that different food companies and food packages will use to trick you into thinking their food is healthy. So, I'm going to go through a few main pitfalls here that I really want you to avoid.

The first culprit in this is glutenfree. If you see gluten-free on a packaging, it does not mean the food is good for you. It just means that it was made without wheat. But wheat is a source of carb like many other sources of carbs. It does not have that big of an impact on your health, especially if you're not gluten intolerant. And gluten is actually a protein. It keeps your glucose levels steady. So when a product is turned into a gluten-free product, often it's replaced by something else that is pure carbs, like some rice flour or something else like that. And in that case, the glucose spike could be even bigger than in the gluten containing product.

So gluten-free does not mean that the product doesn't contain any sugar. It can be the highest sugary, most bad for your food and still be gluten-free. Listen, soda is gluten-free. Gluten-free means nothing about the impact that that food is going to have on your health. It's so important. And just to show you, here's an example, a gluten-free chocolate cupcake. And as you can see from the glucose levels, it creates a big glucose spike. Gluten-free does not mean it's good for you. Do not be fooled into buying gluten-free stuff thinking that, "Oh, this is a healthy food. Oh, this gluten-free cupcake is super good for me." Uh-uh. No, no, no, no. Look at the ingredients. Look at the nutrition facts on the back. Gluten-free does not mean healthy.

Another big one, vegan. If something says it's vegan on the packaging, it does not mean it is good for you. There's nothing that annoys me more than seeing, for example, in a coffee shop where they say, "Oh, this cookie is vegan and gluten-free." And so people are buying that thinking that it's a healthy food all of a sudden. I'm like, "A cookie that's vegan and gluten-free can have really high amounts of sugar in it. It could have really high amounts of really unhealthy vegetable oils. There's no reason to believe that something that is vegan or gluten-free for that matter is good for you. Sugar is vegan. Soda is vegan. You can make vegan ice cream that's really, really high in sugars. There's so many unhealthy things today that are vegan. So again, if you see vegan on the packaging, just ignore it. It doesn't matter. Unless you're vegan, I mean, then it matters. But if you're not vegan, the fact that it says vegan should have zero zero implication and should trick you zero times. Never. Always look at the back of the ingredients list and at the nutrition label."

Another one also, and this is more controversial. So, if something says organic, yes, it's better for you in the sense that it's not going to be filled with pesticides, and yes, potentially it's better for the environment, too. But it's not because it's organic that it's all of a sudden a healthy food. A breakfast cereal that's super high in sugar could be organic and still create a massive glucose spike in your body and set your day up for a massive glucose roller coaster and having a really bad time. So, it's not because it's organic that it's good for you.

And the list goes on and on and on. The message here is simple. Whatever it says on the front of the package in the little, you know, the little bubbles that kind of pop out with a little cool design that says like gluten-free, vegan, organic, blah blah blah, ignore. Look at the back. I want you to be informed and to know exactly where the truth lies. Because you have to remember, food products are products that are heavily marketed and the companies want you to buy them. And it's fine if you want to buy them, and it's fine if you want to buy stuff that has a lot of sugar in them. But I want you to be aware of what you're buying. I don't want you to be tricked.

Listen, I buy ice cream all the time. I love sugary stuff. I'm not saying don't buy the sugar. I'm saying buy it with full awareness. Be aware of what you're doing. And that awareness comes from understanding that the front of the package means nothing. And you have to turn it over to get to the truth.

So, I hope that was helpful. That was kind of like a download of my brain and what I do when I go to the supermarket. And again, if you want all this in a page that you can bring to you when you're grocery shopping, download the PDF in the description of this episode. It has all my tricks in a single page so you can be informed and you can have these superpowers when you're buying your food.

Thank you for watching. I'll see you next time.