Because healthy eating and drinking is very much in the forefront of everyone’s minds today, your local supermarket and even corner shop will contain foodstuff that is labelled down to its finest ingredient. A carton of semi-skimmed milk will show the number of calories, grams of fat, right down to the age of the cow that produced it. Sorry, that’s next year!!

The label is not only important for those who have an allergy to peanuts, for example, where there is an urgent medical need for such information, but also to inform everyone just what it is they are about to ingest and whether it is nutritious or not.

You will have no doubt seen TV Watchdog-type programs where a new product has hit the shelves but lacks any nutritious details on the packaging. It is later discovered to contain very little of what it purports to be!!

So labels are there to help us in our choice of nutritional intake and these days they are more informative than they’ve ever been. The minimum requirements that a company must provide on its foodstuffs are :-

· The amounts of fat, total fat, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, sodium, total carbohydrate, dietry fibre, sugars, protein, vitamins A and C, calcium and iron.

Some companies elect to include the Percentage Daily Value (PDV) – which indicates how much of a specific nutrient one serving the food contains compared with the recommendations for the whole day.

So you’ll probably need a degree in ‘Nutrientology’ to understand all this, but you’ll end up a whole lot healthier. You still better watch out for that car though!!