"I Just Don't Know What to Eat"— How to Read a Food Label in New Zealand.
Almost every client, at some point, says the same thing to me. They don't know what to eat.
Honestly, I don't blame them.
We live in a convenience world. Dinner gets delivered. The biggest section of the supermarket is packaged and prepared food. And somewhere along the way we've lost the art of cooking with ingredients — so of course people don't know. Nobody showed them.
I was talking to someone once about what I'd had for dinner the night before. I can't remember the whole plate now, but I mentioned I'd made potato wedges. They didn't realise wedges were made from potato. They bought the frozen bags, that's what they knew, and they'd never had a reason to question it.
That sounds unbelievable written down. But if nobody has taught you where food comes from, or how to cook and prepare it, why would you know?
Same thing with kids and vegetables. Do the kids of today know what a tomato vine looks like? An apple or orange tree? Do they know carrots grow in the dirt? Or, going back to my story, potatoes.
So this isn't about being smarter than the supermarket. It's about knowing the value of what you're eating — which is a skill, and one you can pick up in about five minutes.
Most of the good stuff doesn't have a label at all
Worth saying first.
Fresh, unpackaged food doesn't carry a nutrition information panel. No NIP on a potato, a fillet of fish or a bag of carrots. If you wanted to compare potato against kūmara per 100g you'd have to look it up.
Which tells you something. If you're mostly eating fresh, unprocessed food, labels matter very little. You're already doing the thing the label is trying to help you approximate.
Labels earn their keep in the packaged aisles. And plenty of people just want to know which muesli to buy compared to the one next to it — that's fair enough, and that's what the rest of this is for.
Serving size, and why it's rarely your serving
Manufacturers set the serving size themselves, usually based on a percentage of daily recommendations.
So your muesli might have a serving size of 45g. That isn't much cereal. But it reads beautifully on the packet, because every number underneath it — energy, sugar, protein — is calculated off that 45g.
Two things follow from that.
The first is that two brands sitting side by side can have completely different serving sizes. When that happens, none of the numbers underneath are telling you the same story, and you're not actually comparing anything. This is why you go to the per 100g column. It doesn't move, and it's probably closer to your real portion anyway.
Stick to the 100g.
The second is to check how many servings are in the pack — especially on things designed to be eaten in one go. A bag of microwave rice looks fine until you notice the panel is for two serves, not one, and you've just eaten both.
Energy: kilojoules are just a different ruler
Here in New Zealand, it's kilojoules. Overseas you'll see calories. Think of them like meters and feet — two ways of measuring the same thing, in this case the energy your body gets from food.
Kilojoules run on a bigger scale, so the numbers look alarming when they aren't. If you want calories, divide the kilojoules by about 4.2. A thousand kilojoules is roughly 240 calories.
That matters because a gap between two products usually looks larger than it is. Two hundred kilojoules between two brands of muesli sounds like a lot. It's under 50 calories.
And this is where you get to make an actual decision rather than just picking the smaller number. If one of them is 50 calories more but has more fibre and less sugar underneath the carbohydrate line, that's the one I'd lean towards. The energy number on its own doesn't tell you how a food is going to behave.
What the carbohydrate line is actually made of
The carbohydrate number is a total. Sitting underneath it you'll usually find sugars, and often fibre. They're part of the same figure.
Once you know that, the total stops being scary and starts being useful.
Rolled oats are a good example. High in total carbohydrate, very little sugar. Now look at the flavoured single-serve oat sachets — same base food, but sugar has been added, so the carbohydrate number climbs and the sugars line climbs with it. Same product family, two different breakfasts.
Fibre is the other half of that. It's the part that slows everything down — it's why plain oats hold you until lunch and the sweetened sachet doesn't, even though both say "oats" on the front. When you're choosing between two similar products, more fibre and less sugar for the same total carbohydrate is almost always the better buy.
And watch the serving size while you're doing it, because a packet can set a smaller serve specifically to make its numbers look closer to a competitor's. Per 100g again.
The ingredient list, and the number in brackets
Ingredients are listed heaviest first. That's a legal requirement and it's the most honest part of the packet.
If sugar is in the first three ingredients, you know roughly what you're holding.
The only catch is that sugar doesn't always say sugar. It shows up as sucrose, glucose, fructose, dextrose, maltodextrin, corn syrup, rice syrup, agave, honey, fruit juice concentrate. You don't need to memorise the list — just read past the first word.
The other thing worth knowing is the percentage in brackets. On anything sold on a single ingredient, that number tells you more than the rest of the packet.
Protein powder is the clearest example. A good one lists whey protein isolate or concentrate first, with a percentage next to it. At 95% and up you're mostly buying protein. Down in the eighties or lower, the rest of the tub is filler — cheap carbohydrate, gums, flavoring, sweetener — and you're paying protein prices for it.
It works anywhere the name is doing the selling. If the packet says beef lasagna, find the number next to the beef.
"High protein", and the one that gets me worked up
You can buy high protein corn chips now. That's where we're at.
The one I see most is protein yoghurt, and it's worth understanding what's actually happened.
Yoghurt is dairy. Dairy is protein. The protein was always there — it's been concentrated, or some has been added, and the product processed a bit differently. Nobody has invented anything.
Then the serving size does the rest. The protein version typically carries a serving 50 to 60 grams larger than standard Greek yoghurt. Bigger serve, bigger protein number on the panel, and a claim on the front of the pot.
Sometimes it runs the other way and the tub itself is smaller — 900g where the standard is a kilo — so you're paying more for less and the front never mentions it.
Go to the per 100g column and compare it against the plain Greek yoghurt beside it. Sometimes the protein one genuinely is better. Often the difference is small enough that it won't move your daily total in any way you'd notice — and you'll have paid two or three dollars extra for it.
That's the real win here. Not catching anyone out. Just making your own call, and keeping some money in your pocket while you do it.
Worth knowing how much protein you actually need before you pay extra chasing it.
If you do one thing
Get your kitchen scales out and weigh what you'd normally eat. Not what the packet calls a serving — what actually goes in your bowl.
Weigh 30g of corn chips. It's about six or seven. Weigh the muesli you have every morning, then look at what the packet says a serving is.
It's a shock the first time. It was for me. You only need to do it for a week or two until your eye recalibrates, then you can put the scales away and estimate for the rest of your life.
Back to the wedges
Reading a label is a useful skill and it's free. But it's a workaround.
The person who didn't know wedges came from potatoes wasn't failing at anything — they'd just never been shown. And the further you get back towards cooking with actual ingredients, the less any of this matters, because most of what you'd be buying doesn't have a panel on the back in the first place.
So learn to read the label for the aisles where you need it. Then spend the rest of your effort on learning to cook a few things properly. That's the part that lasts.
If you want a hand putting the eating side together, that's what the coaching is for. And if you haven't read what a calorie deficit actually is, start there — this article is the tool, that one's the reason you'd pick it up.
