I'm understanding a bit more about how to read the Nutritional labels on packaged items, but when it mentions the Total sugars and then mentions Added Sugars with the percentage, it confuses me. Does anyone know how the percentages are created and how to read them and understand what they mean?
The percentages are based on recommended daily amounts, although for some items listed the daily amount is a minimum and for others it's a maximum. They are based on a theoretical person consuming (I think) 2000 calories per day and with theoretically perfectly normal requirements for nutrients and perfectly normal responses to common ingredients.
If you're diabetic you'll probably need to keep your sugar intake much lower than the suggested amounts. You can figure the suggested daily amounts easily enough from the listed amount and percentage. If I recall the guideline is something like 50g of added sugar per day.
Of course it's not as easy as just figuring that, because manufacturers also use portion concepts that are often best described as "creative". When I buy a bar of chocolate that is divided into chunks such that it's three chunks wide and six chunks long I'd figure a serving size is either three or maybe six chunks. But no, a serving size is five chunks. So one strip is 0.6 of a serving, two strips is 1.2 servings. Then you get the situations where you have a pie in a box and a serving size is 40% of the pie, such that there are 2.5 servings to a pie. You might divide a pie into two or three, but it seems unlikely that you'd cut two slices such that a third unused slice is exactly half the size of the slices that got eaten. Unless you start getting into situations where you're trying to share two pies among five people it's not going to happen. It's even more bizarre when a pie looks like it's a simple thing intended for one person to eat, the nutritional information looks like it's not too loaded with junk, but then you see that a "serving" is 30% of the pie.
It seems to me the nutritional information label is an exercise in ticking legally required boxes while taking active steps to avoid giving the consumer information that's readily useful. At least most of them also include the information for the entire package, so you can figure out your own serving sizes if you're handy with numbers (which is increasingly not the case), or just eat the whole thing and forget about serving sizes.
