What is a food shopping card?
The food shopping card has been designed for you to make healthy decisions when you are out shopping. It is used to compare a range of similar foods and determine which one has lower amounts of sugar, salt, fat and saturated fat in. Look at the food shopping card. For foods to be high in either sugar, salt, fat, and saturated fat, the value on the food package must be on or over the number in the red on the food shopping card. The same rule applies if that number is on or below the number in green, however this time the food package would be low. Any number in between these two values on the food package would be medium.
Here’s an example…
Let’s take a look at the nutritional information found on the back of this example food package. Quick tip, when using the food shopping cards we always use the column (vertical – going up/down) that says Per 100g.
The first nutrient we will look at is fat. The example food package has a value of 15.5g, so it sits in between 3g and 17.5g on the Food Shopping Card, meaning it is medium.
The next is saturated fat (of which saturates). The example food package has a value of 4.9g, meaning it still lies in the medium section, but only just as high would be 5g.
The next one is Sugar (of which sugars). The example food package has a value of 15.9g, so again it is medium as it is in between 5g and 22.5g.
Finally we’ll look at salt. The example food package shows a value of 0.82g, which is in between 0.3g and 1.5g so again, it is medium.
We have looked at all of the different nutrients in the food shopping card and we can make a decision that they are all medium for sugar, salt, fat, and saturated fat. It might be a good idea to have a look at similar foods (the example food package is biscuits) to compare and see if there are more greens on other food packages.
Now you try…
Check out this food package to see how they compare. Remember to use the Per 100g column. Don’t scroll down too quickly though, we have put the answers below for you to check.
Fat – 5.4g (medium/orange)
Saturates – 0.7g (low/green)
Sugar – 19.6g (medium/orange)
Salt – 0.03g (low/green)
