Food labels are extremely important to our health. They keep us informed and help with managing what we intake. As an increasing amount of evidence is made available regarding the effect of processed foods (which require food labels), it's important to understand how to read one and what ingredients to look for. 

Recently San Francisco created warning ads for sugary sodas and NYC is considering a label on high sodium foods. There's no doubt that processed foods and even in restaurants deserve food warnings or labels. We know these foods lead to obesity which lead to diabetes. These new rules represent a solid first step toward keeping consumers healthy and informed. There still remains a number of ingredients being added to our food that should carry warning labels but don't. Here's what you should look for:

1. Aspartame

PepsiCo has recently taken this ingredient out of its beverages but it's still found in more than 6,000 grocery items including diet sodas, yogurts and artificial sweeteners. It's a near-zero calorie artificial sweetener that combines two amino acids with methanol. It's 180X sweeter than sugar. Some studies have shown it could be link to many different types of cancers and consumers have complained of headaches, dizziness, memory loss and seizures. Avoid this additive because of all the unknown information.

2. Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil

This is found in many baked goods, frozen meals and tub margarine and is a hard waxlike fat made by forcing as much hydrogen on a carbon backbone of molecules. To get the consistency, manufactures often blend hard fat with unhydrogenated liquid fats. In theory these should contain zero trans fat but the process of hydrogenation isn't completely perfect and could occur in small amounts. 

3. Artificial Flavors

Not surprisingly, this ingredient can be found in thousands of highly processed foods such as cereals, beverages and cookies. The term "artificial flavoring" is a blanket phrase which could include any number of allowable chemicals, many of them are unknown because they're considered "proprietary" information of food processors, used to imitate specific fruits, butter, spices and others. If a consumer has a bad reaction to any of these flavors, it's nearly impossible for consumers to connect the dots of what caused a reaction they might've had. 

3. High-Fructose Corn Syrup

Many people have heard of this ingredient and that it's not good but aren't sure why. The frightening fact is nearly every food contains some amount of it such as ice cream, cereal, bread, ketchup, canned fruits, yogurt and almost all sweetened beverages. There still lacks any warning label. Ironically, since 1980 the U.S. obesity rate has risen at the same rate of the increased use of high fructose corn syrup.

Food Warning Labels: Public Health

In 2014, the WHO deemed that "junk food" is more damaging to public health today than cigarettes. They presented that warning labels should be used accordingly. It's important for you to be aware of what you eat. The less processed foods, the better but if you must, make smarter choices and look for little to no sugar and short ingredient lists.