A lot of packaged foods in Hong Kong have been imported from other countries such as the US, UK and Australia.
Each of these countries has different laws regulating the layout and type of information provided on a food label, which make it difficult for us to decipher what a food contains and whether it's healthy or not.
A recent study published in September 2006 by the Vanderbilt University in the US found that many people didn't have the reading and maths skills to understand the information on a food label.
If reading a food nutrition label feels like reading Greek, then help is at hand.
Reading a food label is like reading the contents of a book: when you're in a bookstore, the contents page will be one of the first things you look at to help you decide whether the book is worth buying or not.
Apply the same principle to the foods that you buy. Look for key words on a label to help you decode the difference between high-fat and low-fat, or high-fibre and low-fibre foods.
Below is an example of a nutrition label on a 250ml carton of semi-skimmed milk.