YAY! 🎉 It’s National Nutrition Month. Actually, we’re half way through but we’ve been busy eating and celebrating our favourite month, haha.

Seriously though, March is a good time to give some love and attention to good nutrition and all it does for us.

In this blog, we revisit one everyday way for all of us to get in touch with nutrition.

NIP ingredient ignorance in the bud
When it comes to our health, it’s good to take 100% responsibility for what goes into our bodies. None of us want to be ignorant of the food facts. A good place to start is to turn over the pack and get the goss on the back of the pack. That’s where you’ll find the good old Nutritional Information Panel (NIP) and ingredients list. This is where the food facts reside.

We have our standards, OK!
Our Food Standards Australia New Zealand, that is!

At Supercharged Food, all our Love Your Gut products are foods - so fall under Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) regulations. You’ll be reassured to know FSANZ is a world leader in food regulation. The standards are high which helps not only us consumers but also the food industry - ensuring an even playing field of information.

If you’re interested in just digging around, the Food Standards Australia New Zealand site is a veritable Google of food regulation and information.

Medical, pharmaceutical and therapeutic products fall under the TGA - Therapeutic Goods Administration. They have a different set of criteria and approved claims. At Supercharged, we’re more a ‘food as medicine’ brand, not a medical or pharmaceutical brand.

The ingredients list
When it comes to the ingredient list it should be fairly straightforward and to-the-point. It’s not a place for marketing puffery!

Be mindful of preservatives and additives, especially those with the dreaded numbers beside them! It’s hard to avoid these foods but keep them in moderation and strive to find ingredients closest to their natural state.

Some lists are fairly detailed, going into some detail about the ingredient, such as whether it is certified organic or where it is sourced.

It can be overwhelming to wade through some ingredient lists, especially those that get technical. We prefer the more-to-the-point lists. Having said that, as nutritionists we like to go deep on the ingredients, such as what they’re derived from, their providence and what other terms do they go by.

For example, our Love Your Gut powder is 100% diatomaceous earth. As there are many types of diatomaceous earth we add the specifics 'amorphous silica, freshwater type’ and the brand of diatomaceous earth we source - Fossil Shell Flour. These are also markers of quality and food safety.

Nutritional Information Panel (NIP)
Nutritional panels are an information motherlode!

The basics are:

Daily serving size - any nutritional claims must be based on this amount, not the entire contents of the pack.

Percentage; the far right of a panel should contain the ‘per 100g or 100ml’ of the product. This is useful to check out the percentage of a nutrient - whether it’s too high for you.

Key nutrients: Energy or calories, protein, fat, carbohydrates or sugar, dietary fibre and sodium or salt.

Then there’s additional nutrients. These are added when a claim has been made elsewhere on the packaging.

Again, using Love Your Gut powder as an example, we added ‘silica’ and ‘iron’ as the powder is a good source of both these minerals. And we mention them in our packaging text. So we added them to our NIP.

In future blogs, we’ll keep pick apart food packaging, to help you train your attention to the aspects that will help your health.

Lee Holmes : Naturopath and owner of Supercharged Food