APEX PWR | Nutrition Nook
Slides from the original post by Jennie Carolan, MS (@nutritionbyjennie) in collaboration with APEX PWR (@apexpwr). Products shown are examples of labels discussed in the post.
Key Takeaways
Our Nutrition Director, Jennie Carolan, MS, posted these six checks to Instagram this week as a collaboration with APEX, and the response was immediate enough that we wanted them somewhere permanent. Here they are in full, with the reasoning behind each one.
The premise is simple. You are standing in an aisle at Fred Meyer or New Seasons with a box in your hand and about ten seconds of patience. You are not going to pull out an app, log the item and wait for a database match. You need a decision now.
These are six pieces of arithmetic you can do in your head while holding the package. Jennie has used them for years. None of them require you to memorize anything.
The full carousel is embedded below. Each hack has a rule slide and a worked example on a real label, so if you learn better by seeing the highlighted number, swipe through it first and come back.
Add a zero to the protein grams. Compare it to the calories.
20 grams of protein becomes 200. If the calories are at 200 or less, it is a good source of protein. If the calories run well above it, you are holding a carbohydrate and fat product with protein marketing on the front.
This is Jennie's favorite check for bars, and it is the one that saves people the most money.
Run it on a bar advertising 20 grams of protein. Twenty becomes 200. If that bar is 190 calories, almost everything in it is doing the job you bought it for. If it is 310 calories, then roughly 110 calories past the protein are coming from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is sugar, syrup, palm oil or all three.
The same check works on yogurt, shakes, frozen entrees and the entire aisle of products that put a protein number on the front panel. It is not a perfect nutritional assessment and it does not need to be. It is a filter, and it removes most of the shelf in about two seconds.
Divide the carbs by the fiber. You want 5 or less.
Whole intact grains land around 5 to 1 on their own. White bread sits around 20 to 1. At 5 or less, the carbohydrate comes with its fiber. Way above 5, it is refined starch.
The reasoning here is structural. In a grain that has not been stripped, the fiber and the starch arrive together, and that ratio tends to fall out around 5 to 1 without anyone engineering it. Milling removes the bran, the fiber goes with it, and the ratio climbs.
So the number is a proxy for how much processing happened between the field and the bag. A bread with 14 grams of carbohydrate and 3 grams of fiber comes out at 4.6, which clears. A bread at 20 to 1 is telling you the carbohydrate has been separated from the thing that slows it down.
You do not have to know anything about glycemic index, net carbs or any other framework to run this. Two numbers, one division, done.
Divide the sugar by 4. That is teaspoons.
Grams mean nothing to your brain. Teaspoons do. A bar with 18 grams of sugar is four and a half teaspoons of sugar. It hits differently when you picture the spoon.
This one is pure psychology and that is exactly why it works.
Nobody has an intuition for 18 grams. It is a unit that appears on packaging and nowhere else in your life. Four and a half teaspoons is something you can see, because you have spooned sugar into coffee and you know roughly what that pile looks like.
The conversion does not change the food. It changes whether you can actually weigh the food against how much you want it, which is the only decision you are making in the aisle anyway.
Read the first 3 ingredients. That is what you are actually eating.
Ingredients are listed by weight, so the top 3 are the product. If sugar or refined flour is in the top 3, it is dessert wearing a health costume, no matter what the front of the package says. Marketing can be sneaky.
Ingredient lists are ordered by weight, and that ordering is the most honest thing on the package, because it is a legal requirement rather than a marketing choice.
So when a snack with "real ingredients" and "baked with love" on the front lists oats, then brown rice syrup, then cane sugar, the back of the package has quietly told you that two of the three largest things in the bag are sugar in different outfits. The front panel said nothing false. It just talked about something else.
Watch for sugar appearing under several names across the list, which splits the weight and pushes each individual entry lower. Brown rice syrup, cane sugar, cane juice, tapioca syrup, honey and molasses are all sugar for this purpose.
For snacks and frozen meals, sodium mg should be at or under the calories.
300 calories with 900 milligrams of sodium means puffy tomorrow. When sodium outruns calories, it is a salt bomb.
This one has a narrower scope than the others, and Jennie is specific about it: snacks and frozen meals. It is not meant for soup, soy sauce or anything you are obviously using as a seasoning.
Inside that scope it works well. A cracker at 140 calories carrying 380 milligrams of sodium is running close to three times the ratio. Nobody needs to panic about that. It does explain the scale reading the next morning and the rings being tight, and it matters more if your doctor has talked to you about blood pressure.
If you want the practical version: sodium is the most common reason a weekday weigh-in looks wrong after a convenient dinner. That is water, it resolves in a day or two, and knowing the cause keeps you from making a bad decision about your plan based on a number that was never about fat.
Check servings per container before anything else.
Every label trick dies right here. That 160 calorie popcorn bag is 3.5 servings, so finishing the bag is 560 calories.
Jennie lists this one sixth and calls it the thing to check first. Both make sense: it is the check that turns every per serving number into what you will actually eat.
A single serve bag of protein popcorn that lists 160 calories is a 560 calorie bag at 3.5 servings per container. The panel did not lie. It answered a question about a portion nobody eats.
It is worth knowing what this check does not change. Protein against calories, carbs against fiber and sodium against calories are ratios, so they give the same verdict per serving or per bag. Multiply both sides by 3.5 and the comparison holds. What changes is the totals: calories, teaspoons of sugar and milligrams of sodium all go up 3.5 times when you finish the bag, and those are the numbers that add up over a day.
Servings first, then protein, fiber, sugar, ingredients and sodium. Six checks, ten seconds, no app.
| Check | The math | What clears |
|---|---|---|
| Servings | Read servings per container | Multiply everything else by it before judging |
| Protein | Protein grams × 10, compare to calories | Calories at or under that number |
| Fiber | Total carbohydrate ÷ dietary fiber | 5 or less |
| Sugar | Sugar grams ÷ 4 | Teaspoons you are willing to eat |
| Ingredients | Read the first 3 | No sugar or refined flour in the top 3 |
| Sodium | Sodium mg vs calories (snacks, frozen meals) | Sodium at or under calories |
These are heuristics, and heuristics trade precision for speed on purpose. A few good foods will fail one of them, and a few engineered products will pass all six. Plain Greek yogurt fails the fiber rule because it has no fiber at all, even though its few grams of carbohydrate are mostly the natural sugar in milk. Beans fail the sodium rule in a can. A high fiber tortilla can pass the carb to fiber test on isolated fiber rather than intact grain.
That is fine. The purpose is to filter the aisle fast, not to adjudicate every package. If a food you trust fails one check for a reason you understand, buy it anyway. Knowing why you are overriding a rule is a sign the rule is doing its job.
Label literacy is the floor, not the ceiling. It keeps bad choices out of the cart, and that is worth a lot on a Tuesday when you are tired. What it will not tell you is how much you personally should be eating, which is a different question and the one most people actually need answered.
That is what the One-Time Macro Breakdown is for. Jennie builds your numbers off a questionnaire and, when you have one, your DEXA body composition results, and it comes with shopping lists, lean protein options and a sample week. It is the lowest cost way to get accurate information from an actual nutrition professional rather than a calculator.
If the harder part for you is doing it consistently rather than knowing what to do, the 12 Week Nutrition Challenge adds weekly education and ongoing support, and it runs remotely. Both are built for people with jobs and kids, which is most of who we work with.
One more place the aisle matters: supplements are held to a different and looser standard than food, and the same front-of-package problem applies with less oversight behind it. We use Thorne for that reason, and our clients get lifetime 25% off pharmaceutical-grade products through our dispensary.
Six rules will clean up your cart. Your own targets will change what happens over the next twelve weeks. Nutrition coaching with Jennie Carolan, MS is delivered remotely, so you can start from anywhere. Testing and training happen in Tigard, Oregon, minutes from Beaverton off Highway 217.
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