So Don, you keep telling us that if we want to perform beyond what we thought possible, I really need to measure my food (at least until you know how much food you are really eating) and read the labels.  OK I’m in, but what am I looking for.  It really is amazing how much you can learn about a food, just by reading the label and I don’t mean the one on the front.  Words like “organic, all natural, real juice, and low fat” can all be very misleading.  Just to be clear marijuana is all natural and organic, but it is not in my meal plan! ……. I digress.

None the less we can learn a great deal about our food if we just focus on two really important items on the nutrition facts label.  The first is serving size.  The label above says that the serving size is 1/2 of a cup and the container has about 4 cups of this food.  I will wait until the end of the article to tell you what the food is.  The typical western diet would actually consume at least 1 to 1.5 cups and that obviously sends the caloric content of this food through the roof.

The next most important thing is the carbohydrates and how much of those carbohydrates are sugar.  In this case, it is, well lets see, ALL OF THEM! OMG! This food is a very popular breakfast cereal among kids!  That’s right 27 grams of sugar for breakfast, Heck, just give them a bucket of sugar and a salt lick and send them off to school. People, we are killing or kids by overloading them with sugary carbohydrates and then we get mad at them for falling asleep in class.  They aren’t asleep. They are in a sugar comma!

So be careful of portion size and if the carbohydrates in the food comprises more than half of it from sugar, it likely isn’t a good choice.