Hello, Friend! Happy Tuesday Wednesday! You know, babies and travel and schedules… anyway, posting this week’s blog on Wednesday instead! Thanks for your patience ; )
I sincerely hope you’re enjoying this blog! I imagine you’re learning new and insightful things about nutrition, or, at the very least, are entertained by my thoughts! If you would like to help support this newsletter, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $5 per month. This contribution makes a tremendous difference.
If you aren’t already subscribed, or would like to upgrade your subscription, you can do so below. As always, thank you for reading!
A client of mine is spending the summer in Europe! Lucky Duck! And, the last time I talked to him he asked if I could help him understand the differences in nutrition labels in the European Union compared to in the US. Hence, this blog post.
If you weren’t aware, there are differences in what is displayed on the labels, how info is displayed, and what’s required to display, aside from language differences, of course.
Let’s use Fage 0% Greek Yogurt to explore these differences.
Here’s the nutrition information from the Fage US website:
Here’s the information from the Fage International (France) website:
Though some of it is in French, I imagine you can kinda understand what the words are. Here are some of the differences:
The EU uses 100g or 100mL as the amount on ALL nutrition labels, as opposed to the US which allows each product to distinguish its own serving size. Here, we can see that the US label is showing the nutrition info for 1 container (which in this case is 150g), where the EU label shows the aforementioned 100g. While this 100g classification can be helpful to allow you to compare the 100g of one product to 100g of another product, it doesn’t necessarily tell you how much that is of actual yogurt, or how many servings of 100g are in each container. So, you’d have to know how to measure out 100g to understand what you’re eating as the number of servings per container are not required to be listed.
The EU uses the word “Energy” instead of “Calories.” While they essentially mean the same thing (the EU label’s kcal metric is equivalent to what the US label lists as calories), I like the idea of using the word “energy” to allow people to make decisions more proactively.
Both labels list sugars specifically, but the US only just started requiring an additional line for “Added Sugars.” I think this is an important distinction. While technically all sugars fall under the category of carbohydrates, I think the awareness around the inclusion of added sugars, as opposed to naturally-occurring sugars, in one’s diet are worth being mindful of.
The EU label lists “Salt” as opposed to “Sodium.” The US lists sodium content (measured in milligrams) on nutrition labels, while the EU lists salt content (measured in grams). This might seem similar, but it is not: salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride, while sodium is a term that includes salt but can also be found in additional ingredients, such as baking soda. So the sodium metric may give us a more holistic number to use than just salt.
The EU “only” requires the calories/energy, fats, saturated fats, carbohydrates, sugars, protein, and salt to be listed. The rest of the metrics are optional. Alternatively, US labels tend to list far more vitamins and micronutrients, as well as a specific line for cholesterol and Trans Fats.
In the EU, words on labels are not required to be bolded or have a certain font size and are sometimes hard to read. Here’s a real example of an EU label:
For the sake of comparison, here’s a US label:
I don’t know how many of the readers of this blog are traveling to Europe, or eating foods with European nutrition labels, any time soon, but I figured since one person asked, it might be helpful for more than just him. Or, maybe it’s just fun to know!
For what it’s worth, I see a lot out there on the medias about how much “healthier” food is in Europe compared to the US. And while that may or may not be true—I haven’t done enough research on this personally—it is interesting to see the differences in what is required on labels in the various geographic spaces and how easy or difficult it might be to interpret.
Anyway, I hope this info is helpful to you if you have travels to Europe in your future. And if you’ve travelled there in the past, I’d love to hear about your experiences with nutrition labels while you were there! Share in the comments or email me at sara@nutritionforlifeproject.com!
As always, thank you for reading!
xoxo,
Sara