11 Common Words With Very Specific Meanings on Food Labels in the U.S.

One of the responsibilities of the Food and Drug Administration is to assure that foods are labeled properly. It provides regulations on what, where, and how prominently information should be placed on packaging. The idea is that consumers should not be misled by what they read on the groceries they buy. However, the labels should also be written in plain, understandable language. This means that sometimes regular English words—words that have commonsense but slightly fuzzy meanings—must be defined more precisely for food labeling.

Here are 11 words that mean something more specific on the supermarket shelves. (Please note, however, that this is not intended to be a complete listing of all the requirements of all the foods, which can sometimes have incredibly complicated technical exceptions—not to mention court cases and differing jurisdictions. There’s only so much an article can do without simply giving the regulations verbatim.)

1. Imitation
2. Free
3. Low
4. Reduced/less
5. Light
6. High
7. Good source
8. More
9. Lean
10. Healthy
11. Natural

Imitation

A food that looks like another food, and is intended to be a substitute for another food, but isn’t made of the same stuff, is an imitation, right? Not quite. It only has to be labeled with imitation if it has a lower amount of protein or some other essential nutrient (though not fat content if other labeling requirements are followed) than the food it’s trying to look like and doesn’t have some other common descriptive name.

Free

If it’s free of fat, or sugar, or salt, it doesn’t mean that not one trace of those things is to be found in it. The FDA evaluates certain terms with reference to a typical portion size known as an RACC (“reference amounts customarily consumed per eating occasion”). An RACC of eggnog, for example, is half a cup. For croutons, it’s 7 grams, and for scrambled eggs, 110 grams. To be labeled free of calories, the food must have less than 5 per RACC. For fat and sugar, less than .5 grams. For sodium, less than 5 milligrams. Also, the food must somehow be processed to be free of those things in order to get the simple “free” label. You can’t have “fat free lettuce,” only “lettuce, a fat free food.” (Note—this is specifically for nutrients. According to the FDA, as of 2024, “other than the term ‘gluten-free’ there are no regulations defining specific conditions (e.g., allergen levels) for a product to make a ‘free’ claim from a major food allergen source. If voluntary allergen-free claims are used, they must be truthful and not misleading.”)

Low

Low is also defined with respect to set portion sizes and varies with whether it refers to calories, fat, or sodium. For fat it’s 3 grams or less. For calories, it’s 40 or less, unless it’s a prepared meal, in which case it’s 120 per 100 grams. Saturated fat and cholesterol have specific “low” values as well.

Reduced/less

Sometimes manufacturers want to make a relational claim about a food—not just that it’s low in some substance, but lower than it usually is (which may mean it doesn’t meet the standard for low at all). Relational claims are evaluated with respect to a reference food. A reference food should be the same type of food (chocolate ice cream compared to other chocolate ice cream) from either the same manufacturer, a different manufacturer, or even an average of the top three brands (and the reference food cannot already be low-whatever). The reduced substance must be less than 25 percent of what it is in the reference food.

Light

Light (or lite) is also evaluated with respect to a reference food (though with slightly stricter rules than reduced/less), and a rather complicated set of conditions is taken into account for different substances. For example, if a light product has more than half of its calories from fat content, the fat must be reduced by half (or more) per reference serving amount. If less than half its calories come from fat, it can also be “light” if the calories per serving are reduced by one-third. The term can also be used on a “meal product” if it’s either low in calories or low in fat, but the package has to specify which one it is. Anything labeled “lightly salted” should have 50 percent less sodium than a reference food. But don’t think light brown sugar is a low calorie food—if there’s a tradition of using the word light for a product to the point it’s become a critical means of identification, manufacturers are allowed to put the word on their label without the other requirements [PDF]. Another out is if it’s light in color or light in texture, provided that the color/texture clarification is clearly attached to light.

High

Our food labels don’t only brag about low levels of the bad stuff, but also about high levels of the good stuff. The word high (or phrases like rich in or excellent source of) means that the food has 20 percent or more of the recommended daily value for that nutrient per reference serving.

Good source

Good source of is a little lower than high. A food with this label should have 10 to 19 percent of the recommended daily value.

More

Below good source are more, fortified, enriched, added, extra, and plus. A food with 10 percent of the recommended daily value can use one of these, but it only applies for vitamins, minerals, protein, fiber, and potassium.

Lean

​​The word lean when applied to seafoods or game meats means that they have less than 10 grams of total fat, no more than 4.5 grams of saturated fat, and less than 95 milligrams of cholesterol per RACC and per 100 grams. (The USDA—which has primary responsibility for many meats—uses the same numbers for lean beef but only cares about per 100 grams.)

The numbers are slightly different for what the FDA describes as “mixed dishes not measurable with a cup” (burritos, egg rolls, pizzas, sandwiches, that kind of thing [PDF]—thinking in terms of something that’s a quick bite to eat isn’t exactly accurate but also not entirely incorrect). For those, the requirements are “less than 8 {grams} total fat, 3.5 {grams} or less of saturated fat, and less than 80 {milligrams} cholesterol.”

Healthy

For many years, the FDA said that for a product to qualify as “healthy,” it had to meet limits on total fat, saturated fat, sodium, and dietary cholesterol, and it had to have at least 10 percent of the recommended daily value for a range of nutrients. But in 2024 (with an effective date of February 25, 2025, and a compliance date in 2028), the FDA announced a change. Now there are limits on added sugars, saturated fat, and sodium (the limits on total fat and dietary cholesterol have been removed) and the product must “contain a certain amount of food from at least one of the food groups or subgroups (such as fruit, vegetables, grains, fat-free and low-fat dairy and protein foods) recommended by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans” [PDF].

Natural

After years soliciting suggestions and considering comments on the question of what natural should mean, no useful consensus could be reached, and the FDA decided to forgo establishing an official definition. Though it hasn’t issued rules for the use of natural, it endorses the general understanding that it implies nothing artificial or synthetic has been added that would not normally be expected to be added.

But the FDA isn’t the only labeling game in town. One of the others that looks into the natural label is the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, whose job is to look into the labeling of many meats, poultry, catfish, and egg products. While natural is not defined in regulations, they do have to approve the label before sale, though in their case natural pretty much just means that there’s no artificial ingredients or colors, and there was minimal processing [PDF].

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A version of this story ran in 2013; it has been updated for 2025.