Food Labels 101 :

Look at the ingredients on the back of your ice cream. What do you expect to see? Milk, sugar, perhaps vanilla? What you might find, though, is glycerol monostearate, an emulsifier that can help to keep the milk fat in suspension and limits the growth of ice crystals on the ice cream.

Labels can be deceiving and many times we don't even know what we are eating! The ingredients with the strange names usually fall under certain categories and serve certain functions in our food. For instance:

Acidity regulators: These are used to adjust the acidity or basicity of foods and include buffers, acids, alkalis and neutralizing agents.

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Emulsifiers: These are very common and allow for easier mixing of oils and water. One example of a food emulsifier is egg yolk.

Modified starch: A type of thickening agent.

Stabilizers: These are added to food to help stop them from separating.

Sweeteners: Natural and non-sugar sweeteners. "There are many, many ways to say 'sugar,' and consumers are not often aware that a product contains a lot of sugar, because it doesn't say sugar," says nutritionist Susan Burke.

"All nutritive sweeteners have a similar amount of calories, ranging from 16 calories per teaspoon for white sugar (sucrose) to 20 calories for honey. Read the label; you'll be surprised to see all the sugars in a box of breakfast cereal. They all have similar nutrition. Even if you think it's healthier, it's still just sugar as far as your body is concerned. If you eat too much, it's stored as fat."

These sugars often appear on food ingredient lists: glucose, fructose, lactose, maltose, sucrose (white sugar), corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup, brown sugar, honey, malt syrup, fruit-juice concentrate and cane sugar.

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