The back-of-pack nutrition table can feel like a wall of numbers. It isn't — most of it is noise. Here's the 30-second version that works for almost anything in a box or a bag.
Step 1 — Check the portion size
Everything on the label is reported per serving. Manufacturers choose the serving size, and they often choose it to be smaller than what a normal person eats. A cereal box might say "30 g" when a real bowl is 70 g. If the serving looks tiny, mentally double or triple the numbers.
Most EU labels also show per-100 g values. Those are the honest ones for comparing two products.
Step 2 — Look at sugar, salt, saturated fat
These three, per 100 g, tell you most of what you need:
- Sugar: below 5 g/100 g is low, above 22.5 g/100 g is high (UK FSA traffic-light thresholds).
- Salt: below 0.3 g/100 g is low, above 1.5 g/100 g is high.
- Saturated fat: below 1.5 g/100 g is low, above 5 g/100 g is high.
You don't need to memorise the numbers. Just notice which of the three are in the "high" zone. A breakfast cereal that's high in sugar isn't a tragedy — it's a fact to know.
Step 3 — Read the first three ingredients
Ingredients are listed by weight, highest first. If sugar (or one of its aliases — glucose, fructose, dextrose, maltose, rice syrup, fruit concentrate) appears in the first three, that product is structurally a sweet food, regardless of what the front says.
Step 4 — Count the additives
Every additive has a name or an E-number. A product with 2–3 additives is usually fine. A product with 10+ additives is telling you something about its manufacturing process — not necessarily dangerous, but definitely ultra-processed.
Nourisk does this automatically, but the manual version takes 5 seconds: just eyeball how long the additive list is.
That's it
Portion size. The big-three per 100 g. First three ingredients. Additive count. You now know more about what's in the box than 95 % of shoppers, and you'll do it faster every time.
The point isn't to eat perfectly. It's to choose on purpose.