Diet Freebies - free stuff for dieters. If you're dieting and need help then we've got it - FREE

How many Calories?

How many Calories?

I went shopping recently with a friend of mine and we stopped briefly at the yoghurt aisle. Yoghurt being a healthy option in most people's books its something I buy for my lot fairly regularly.

However on this day we spotted some sparkling new style yoghurts we'd never seen before. They were exotic flavours too - a chocolatey one and a toffee fudge. Smallish pot - so I only had a quick glance at the calories... and boy was I shocked!

These small pots of yoghurts were over 300 calories each! Bear in mind that a medium mcdonalds french fries is only 293 calories and you'll get to see what I'm talking about!

That is a horrific amount for someone to be tucking into after a meal!

Have you looked at the cans, packets and jars you've bought recently. More and more items are having their calories on BUT I've seen some really stupid things like:::

• Calories per 100g but no weight of packet anywhere
• Calories per portion when its "16" portions or 4 normal ones
• Calories not shown at all!

What I think would really help people in the UK would be clear and useful package information.

I think food labels should show

• calories per 100g
• Calories per individual item
• calories per whole packet

I think calories per 100g is a useful measure as a direct comparison of food stuffs or similar items but I don't think that on its own its useful.

I've tried to explain calories to my partner and to train him to look out for them on packets. He's quite good at maths so its not a problem him working out what the 60g of food is when calories/100g is know.
However I know that lots of people would struggle or might even think that the calories per 100g is the actual amount in the whole container.

For biscuits lots of them list the calories per item and I think that this is great! It allows you to make an informed decision about how many biscuits you can eat!

Some food companies also take the biscuit when making low calories food stuff. Check out diet museli and normal museli. There is normally next to no difference in calories per 100g - and when you consider you'd only normally have say 25g of cereal for breakfast then you'd only be saving a quarter of not very much!

Check out lower calorie mayonaise too! Then check out the ingredients they use to make the lower calorie item! Sometimes I think its worth having the normal item and then just making sure you use less of it.

This isn't to say that I don't think diet items are a good thing. I like low fat yoghurts. I like the choice I have in the supermarket!

You always need to watch calories on packets and containers - start making a habit of it and let me know of any amusing labels!

Obviously supermarkets don't put the calories on fresh fruit - perhaps they should so that you can see the calories you could have instead of a biscuit!

The UK government is trying to make us all thinner and healthier and I think that there are several steps that they can do to ensure that we do start to eat better.

The first thing would of course to ensure that fruit and vegetables are kept at low prices - whether this is thorugh encouraging more UK grown, seasonal vegetables or giving people other incentives, or encouraging supermarkets to help.

Then all processed foods would be better labeled in a way which offers something meaningfull to the average person. So that could be calories per whole item, indivudal item etc.

Source: Mcdondald Calorie Counter