Branded Food Items - Comparison Chart

danjo-xx

I was looking at the new consumer prog on rte last night and am just wondering is their an online comparison chart that compares brand names as regards to their salt/sugar/calorie content etc.

Example say I wanted to compare Yoplait with Actmel for instance to see which is a healthier option. Does such a chart exist for most foods/drinks accross the board.

dudara

Moved to Nutrition & Diet

dudara

EileenG

There are a lot of food comparison websites out there, but the easiest thing is to go to the supermarket, pick up the two you are interested in, and compare their nutrition labels.

As a general rule, I would tend to go for the one with the smallest number of ingredients. If one yogurt has "Milk, culture" as the ingredients, and another has "Milk, modified starch, sugar, fruit puree, sweetener, stabiliser, perservative, colour, natural aroma" I'd pick the first one, even if it is higher calorie.

danjo-xx

Sorry about the wrong forum guys....I knew I was lost;)

thanks EileenG any links to some of those sites.




Just kinda looking for a quick reference comparison chart by category...eg.

Yoghurt
Yoghurt Drinks
Juice Drinks
Confectionary
etc etc


so I could look up say the top selling products under any category and see at a glance which brands are near the top for low sugar & low salt content and maybe calorie count as well.

I don't bring my reading glasses when out shopping and its a right pain taking the other ones off several times to read labels.

EileenG

Offhand, I'd say avoid all of those things except the yogurt, and in that case, go for the plain yogurt you like best. Personally, I love the Lidl Greek style yogurt. Not a low calorie yogurt, but so thick and filling that you really feel you are getting proper food out of it.

Yogurt drinks, fruit juice and confectionary are all pretty crap. Eat yogurt, eat whole fruit, eat the very occasional bar of good dark chocolate, skip the rest.

www.mysupermarket.co.uk has a nutrition section on it which lets you look at the nutrition labels of a lot of own brand and big name brands.

rubadub

I find mysupermarket good as it is real brands. I do not like the WW points pages which are often out by huge amounts, esp. on very vague things like takeaway foods. Independent sites on alcohol are often wrong, very hard to get info on some booze.

You also have to learn how to interpret them and what they really mean, like a wispa bar is lower in kcals than a dairy milk, but per 100g they are probably identical, just different portion sizes. Stuff like rice might have values cooked or raw so at a glance you might mix them up. A mate of mine told me one brand of rice is half the kcals of others recently -impossible.

I have been reading labels since I was a kid, I just know what to expect now, and have spotted quite a few actual packs in supermarkets with incorrect info. If you blindly accept values it could lead to trouble, I know some are mistakes since it is a physical impossibility to have some values I have seen (e.g. some had a decimal place wrong so out by a factor of 10).

danjo-xx

It can be a bit of a minefield all right. Thanks guys will check out mysupermarket for brand names.:)