Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Ask a Nutritionist, our weekly mini episode of Dishing Up Nutrition.

I'm Leah Kleintrode, a registered and licensed dietitian with nutritional weight and wellness.

Have you ever picked up a

product in the grocery store, flipped the package over, glanced at the nutrition label,

and thought, is this a good choice for me? Is it the right choice for me? Or, okay, what do all these

numbers actually mean? Or do you just end up choosing the product with the prettiest

packaging in the end? I'm guilty as charged for that. We've probably all faced these conundrums at some

point. And as a registered dietitian, I can tell you that nutrition labels aren't meant to be

confusing, but they are often misunderstood.

So today we're going to spend some time breaking down and decoding that little black box that's on the back,

so you can better navigate food choices while you grocery shop.

This may actually be a great opportunity for some hands-on learning also.

So if you're close to food or a beverage product with a nutrition label, go ahead and grab it.

And if you're listening to this, set a later date, hit pause if you need to.

And you can play along as we walk through how to use this information.

So let's start with probably one of the biggest questions I get with when I'm counseling or teaching

classes and we're just getting into how do we navigate the food scene? How do we navigate the grocery

store? How do we know what kinds of foods we should be putting in our bodies? So we want to look at

one, we're reading that nutrition label,

what's the most important thing that we're looking at or what's the first thing that we're

looking at? Where should we direct our eyes first? And many of us just out of habit or practice,

go right to looking at fat grams, how many calories there are, the percentage of daily sodium there is.

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