Nutrition Labels - An Analysis

[Erin Nash]

Today, you analyzed a "healthy" food, as well as a food that you thought was not "healthy"

In your post today, talk about when you learned when analyzing your food. Here is what I want you to consider:

Tell us a little about your healthy food - what was it, and when do you eat it? Was this food actually healthy? How do you know? What type of fat did it contain? What type of carbohydrates?


Also, tell us a little bit about your unhealthy food. Was your unhealthy food actually unhealthy? Once again, how do you known? What type of fat did it contain? Carbohydrates?

Next, I want you to predict how many calories you consume every day, in comparison to how many your actually burn.

In order to calculate your total number of calories that you require per day, travel to this website. First calculate your basal metabolic rate by using this calculator. Then, use that number to figure out how many calories you need per day.

Finally, summarize what you learned from this experience. How did this open your eyes to what you eat every day?

[Ally S]

My healthy food that I chose was raw shrimp with some spices. It turned out to only have four calories: zero calories from carbs or fat, and the four came from protein. It obviously turned out to be extremely healthy. I don't eat shrimp often, but when I do eat it, it's usually breaded. :)

My unhealthy food was a Whopper Jr. w/ cheese from BK.

Very unhealthy sandwich. Very unhealthy.

It has 434 calories: 124 calories from carbs, 76 calories from protein, and a whopping (haha) 234 calories from fat. I don't eat Whoppers, or really anything from BK, and now that I know this, I certainly wouldn't be ordering a Whopper.


I think that I have more of an athlete's metabolism. I eat a lot in small portions, and I do a lot during the day. I think the ratio between consumed calories and burned calories in my system is pretty even. If anything, I burn more calories than I eat.

[Laci Shoemaker]

Today when we analyzed 'healthy' & 'non-healthy' foods I brought in Apple Sauce & Nutty Bars.

My 'healthy' food was apple sauce, I didn't eat it because it was hot, so yeah..I think this food is actually healthy because it has 100% carbs, and not any fats, or so it said. :P I know this because I analyzed it. The type of fats it contained were none..but it contains fiber and sugar.

My 'un-healthy' food was Nutty Bars, I haven't eaten them for a long time because I'm trying not to eat fattening food because I want to be healthy. Yes, my un-healthy food was actually unhealthy, I know this because it has 330 calories per two sticks! That's insane!! The types of fats it had were saturated fats (8 grams) and it contains 1 g of dietary fiber and 22 grams of sugar! Holy cow!

I think I consume about 3000 calories each day and I have no idea how many calories I burn, probably not that much since I'm chunky.

[Laci Shoemaker]

According to the little BMR thing, I need 1069 calories per day.

This opened my eyes because not everything you eat is healthy, or at least the stuff that you think is healthy really is not, and I like the fact that we learned how to calculate that. :)

[Miranda Lynn Stanton]

My healthy food was a Quaker Granela Bar(chocolate chunk). I will sometimes eat this food between school and cheer practice. This food was not as healthy as the food label says it is. The food label said there was 90 calories but there was acctually 98 calories. This contained saturated fat and trans fat. It also contained dietary fiber and sugars.
My unhealthy food was Lays Stax Original. I eat these as a late night snack or when we grill. This food is not as good for you. The label said it has 150 callories but it acctually has 153 callories. This contained saturated fat, polyunsaturated fat, monounsaturated fat, and trans fat. It contained dietary fiber and sugars.
I really don't know how many calories i take in. I probably burn off a lot because I am active.

[josh steltenpohl]

My healthy food wasn't really a food, it was a small bottle of Gatorade. It was healthy compared to my other choice which was Kelloggs Pop Tarts. The pop tarts weren't necessarily unhealthy but they are as good for you as the Gatorade. Right now i am burning a lot of calories and not taking in the needed amount. The reason for this is because i a m losing weight at wrestling practice. I am suppose to take in 1766 calories everyday. This activity made me realize that not all the foods i thought were unhealthy were actually that.

[Hunter Ewart]

My "good" food was Nacho Cheese Doritos the reduces fat ones we get in the cafeteria. Sometimes for lunch when i get a sandwich at school. Well compared to my unhealthy one it was closer then what i thought it would be. I was comparing the labels and i realized that its probably not the best choice for me to eat. The fat that it contained was saturated, polyunsaturated, and monounsaturated fats. I'm not a genius but all of that can't be good for you. It has dietary fiber and sugar as well.

The "Bad" food i chose was brownie bites from K.F.C. Its a good thing I ate it before I came to class because otherwise I would have thrown it away. There's fiber and sugar. The saturated fates and the trans fates are both in this product. Well the numbers say it all when it comes to making the decision to eat or not now i have deiceded to check out the label before i eat it. I predict that i eat about 3,000 calories a day. an i do very little .

[Hunter Ewart]

I really didn't pay any attention as to how much i ate or what i ate. Being active i really didn't care it was food so i ate it I'm sure a lot of us do the same thing. I hear all kinds of diet ads saying the fast easy way to loose weight just do this. I got a wake up call when i was reading the food label. It was shocking, The calories and carbs that we put in our body at largest numbers creates the healthy problems that occur in our future. I challenge anyone to calculate the calories they intake against the calories that they actually take in.

[Shandis Cruz]

I learned quite a bit today about "healthy" and "unhealthy" foods. From previously looking into this topic I learned that marketing plays a huge role on what foods we believe to be "healthy." My "healthy choice" is the perfect example. My healthy food was Kellogg's Nutri- Grain Cereal Bar, they cleverly stamped "More of the Whole Grains Your Body Needs" right on the front of the bar. Don't get me wrong this is somewhat true, it does contain more whole grains than that of a Snickers, but when classifying it as healthy I really don't think it would "strongly" fit category. But for me, I only eat these every once in a great while, when I'm on the run and haven't eaten or if I'm running late and need to grab a quick breakfast, so I don't think that based on the way that I eat them are bad. Although, if someone were eating these as a "snack" with their lunch I would classify them as "bad" because they cosist of 73% carbs and say you were eating them with your lunch, which consisted of a sandwich and adding in the carbs from the two slices of bread, you would be eating a very high carbohydrate based meal, which in some cases isn't good. The Nutri- Grain Bar consisted of: Calories: 130, Carbs: 24g, Protien: 2g, Fat: 3g. Although I have more of an understanding, I still find a few areas a little gray.

[Taylor Woodruff]

Well my healthy food that I chose was an apple, because I usually eat around 2 a week so I figured that would be the perfect healthy food for me to look up. I figured it was healthy because for one it's a fruit, it's natural, and it doesn't have any preservatives. Considering it had a total of 17g carbs, 0g of protien, and 0g of fat, I'd probably have to say that it is actually healthy because there's not any fats in it. Even though you do need some fats in your diet, I figured you could just get them from a different food, that all-in-all it's healthy.

The unhealthy food that I chose was sour skittles, because that's my favorite candy, and I wanted to know how bad it really is for you. I knew it was going to be pretty unhealthy because there's so much sugars in it. So, when I looked at all it contained I found it had 44g of carbs, 0g of protein, and 2g of fats, even though those numbers don't look very big compared to the apple, to me it seems like a lot just because package of skittles are a lot smaller than the apples.

When using the calculator, I honestly didn't know what I was supposed to do exactly, so I don't even know if this is what you were wanting?... but for the the calculation I found I have a BMR of 1371.45.

[Sean Grinstead]

In the discussion i choose raisins and ho-ho's. I choose the raisins as the healthy food because it is a dried fruit so i figured it didn't have very much fat. I choose the snack cake as the unhealthy food because it had a large amount of calories for the size of one serving. In the discussion i learned that you get certain amounts of calories compared to the grams of the substance. for example, for every gram of carbohydrates there is about 4 calories. Same for proteins, for every gram of proteins you have you get about 4 calories. But when you get fat it is different, when you have one gram of fat you get 9 calories.
On my raisins food label, i had 130 total calories, it had 31 grams of carbs, 0 grams of fat and 1 gram of protein. To get my total it should add up to 130 calories by multiplying the grams of carbs by four and the grams of protein by four. there is no fat so there would be no point to multiply the 0 grams by nine. i end up with 124 calories from carbs, and 4 calories from the protein but it still doesn't add up to the 130 calories. its because the food companies are aloud to round by alot. in this case its only 2 calories.
On my Ho-Ho's food label, I had a total of 370 calories. It had 54 grams of carbs, 17 grams of fat, and 2 grams of protein. it all added up to about 216 of the calories are form carbs, 153 calories form fat and only 8 calories from proteins. it all adds up to about 377 calories. that suprised me because it rounded down so far.
This mad me think about how far a good food would round. the chances are that a good food wouldn't care about the amount of calories and would round up or down sparingly. An unhealthy food is probably going to round down as much as possible because it will make it seem better, not by much but it shows that they are trying to make it seem like less.
I think that i actually burn 4000 calories a day because I'm a very active person. It said my BMR was 1780.7 and it said to calculate the amount of calories then I need to multiply that number by 1.725 because of how active I am. I exercise 6-7 times a week at moderate to hard intensity. It said I need to burn 3071 calories to maintain the weight that I'm at. I learned that it all depends how many calories you get is how you lose, gain, or maintain weight.

[Kylie Warner]

The food that I brought was apples and Wheat Thins. The apple slices were healthy. I know this because it was 100% Carbohydrates and nothing else. I think that the carbohydrates came from fructose mainly.

The Wheat Thins, then, were obviously the unhealthy food. With 230 calories it had 35% of fat. I learned this from my analysis. Also more than that., there was 60% carbs and the rest came from protein. So I think that I would consider Wheat Thins very unhealthy.

Doing this activity, I've learned a lot about my diet. I eat small things but it last through out the day so by the time I go to bed I know that I consume way more than 2000 calories a day. And of I'm to be honest with myself, I eat Wheat Thins like everyday and that's already 230 calories. And on top of whatever else I consume, I think that my eating habits are definitely unhealthy!

[Ali Bargu]

During this class periods (that I mostly missed) my personal goal was to learn how i can make my diet better then it is now. I figured out what specific parts of the ingredients are good, bad or which one you should look at according to your bodies needs and wants.

I thought about two healthy and unhealthy things in my diet. The first one was Iceberg salad and the unhealthy part was Chocolate Chip Cookies from McDONALDS. After looking at the percentage of each of the ingredients of the cookies i came to the conclusion that it is unhealthy, because not just that one cookie has 268 calories but it is mostly from bad carbs and unsaturated fats. ==> This shows: Carbs are good if they come from good ingredients there can also be a lot of bad carbs in "good" and "healthy" food. The iceberg salad is mostly consisting of water. With its 1 calorie it is a good thing. But what you have to think about at the same time is that you can make this salad very unhealthy with putting way to much, and to fatty dressings and toppings (Chesse) on it.

An other thing that needs to be considered is the way advertisements in TV and Radio try to make their own food "healthy" and really good for YOU and YOUR CHILDREN! These statements should be controlled really skeptically because their "doctors and tests" who approve those can play around with the numbers of Calories and Carbs and Fats really good. The reason for that is apparently that most of the people dont know what to do with those numbers. And THAT and WHY ,those things are how they are, is what I want to learn when we finished the whole blog!