After spending almost a year in Thailand, I learned how to read a nutrition label in Thailand by comparing labels in English to Thai ones. I hope this helps you have a more well-rounded shopping experience!
Trying to find the right balance of nutrition while traveling, or after moving to another country, can be quite challenging.
You want to try all the different food products in the grocery stores but are unsure of what nutritional value they have.
How much fat is in this? How many grams of sugar does this have? The questions go on and on.
Most people will take one look at a nutrition label in another language, just shrug their shoulders, and throw the item into their grocery cart without thinking twice.
To be honest, I was one of those people.
When I moved to Thailand I initially just bought whatever products looked like products I would buy back home in the States. This applied to yogurts, bread, nutrition bars, and crackers for example since I could not read the labels.
Sometimes I got lucky and the packaging had labels in both English and Thai, but most of the time it was just a guessing game.
Kind of like this yogurt nutrition label in Thailand:
Yes, you can always just eat “fresh” non-packaged food, but in Thailand, a serving of Pad Thai from a food cart is high in sugar and fat. And you don’t want to put on weight from eating Thai food every day now do you?
Here are some little tricks on how to read a nutrition label in Thailand.
I had to cheat and buy an American junk food product in Thailand to show you how I figured out how to read the label when it was only in Thai – no judgments.
You can see here on this bag of “American Corn Snacks” that they have provided a label in English and in Thai.
Let’s start from the top and read down:
The first box at the top will be the serving size and servings per container.
The second box is the caloric count in one serving
In the third box you will start to see bolded and un-bolded lines.
Bold Line #1 = Total Fat, followed by saturated fat
Bold Line #2 = Cholesterol in milligrams
Bold Line #2 = Protein in grams
Bold Line #4 = Total Carbohydrates in grams, followed by Dietary Fiber in grams and Sugar in grams
Bold Line #5 = Sodium
The next box is the vitamins. Some labels have the vitamins and others do not. You should be getting your vitamins from “real food”, fruits and veggies, and not from American Corn snacks or white bread so I won’t go into detail with the vitamins on this label.
Let’s take a look at this cracker label, you can see here I pointed out what everything means in English for you.
If you care about the sugar count in packaged foods as I do, train your brain to look for the 4th bold line. The second un-bolded line under the 4th bold line, is the sugar count.
Let’s look at this yogurt label again.
The entire label is in Thai so I will break it down for you. The first bold line is fat, the second is cholesterol, the third is protein, and fourth is the total carbs (dietary fiber and sugar are under that) and sodium is last.
Now you can officially read Thai!
Well maybe not… but at least you can hopefully avoid getting fat from eating pad Thai every day and read the nutrition label in Thailand easier.
I hope that this article will help you to read a nutrition label and eat in the Thai language easier, the next time you are in a grocery store.
Not feeling the packaged food still? Check out this post here to find out which Thai meals are the “healthiest” options.
Visiting Thailand? Here are my Guides:
- 21 Things to Do in Krabi Town
- Where to Go on Khao San Road to Avoid the Crowds
- Where to Workout in Chiang Mai
- 8 Reasons to Live in Chiang Mai
- What to Do in Koh Phi Phi to Avoid the Crowds
- The Best and Worst of Chiang Mai
- How to Lose Weight Eating Thai Food Everyday
- 10 Things to Do in Bangkok in 24 Hours
Brilliant idea!! Where there any food items that surprised you on the content of fat protein and carbs that you might have originally thought it was fairly healthy?
They don’t really have “low fat” packaged foods in Thailand so everything was pretty high in my mind. But it was the sugar count that was getting to me, the yogurts were all flavored so the count was much higher then it needed to be with plain yogurt.
Have tou tried to buy sauces? I can’t read Thai but there brands that have ingredients written in English there are INS with numbers next to them. Additives and fructose syrup are common on the ingredient list.
Yes, I did actually see that. So much added sugar in almost every sauce and the drinks also, its really unfourtunate.
It’s interesting to see they have similar recommended daily intakes to what we have in the US. But I guess it’s not really surprising… science is kinda universal after all 😛
Yes! It was pretty much the same everywhere!
Well, I’m noticing the carbs on one label says 19g, but only 1 gram of fiber and 3 grams of sugar…so what are the other carbs?! Im thinking maybe the “sugar” part only includes the extra “added sugar”. I suspect it doesn’t include the naturally occurring sugars in a product. I dont know enough about Thai food labeling laws…Does anyone else know?
I thought the same thing, it was not what I was used to when reading labels, that’s for sure. Heading back there in 2023 to inspect labels again to see if they made any changes!
My partner is Thai. We live in Melbourne Australia, but she loves to get imported Thai food from a Thai supermarket. All very processed and not very healthy in my view. One of her favourites is Dutch Mill drinking yoghurt. Just stumbled across this article – so now I can read the pack. Yikes, it has 22g sugar in a 180ml serve.
I didn’t realise pad thai had so much sugar 🙁 Best pad thai I have ever had was at a street cart in Chumphon. Will have to have it as a treat, not a regular meal!
thanks