Developing Health Numeracy through the Analysis of Nutrition Labels

Abstract This study explores the use of nutrition labels as a context for fostering proportional reasoning in secondary mathematics. Grounded in health numeracy research, it assumes that engaging with real food data connects ratio, proportion, and percentage calculations with argumentation skills needed to interpret and evaluate nutritional information. A five-part didactic sequence was designed as a conceptual replication of previous interventions, adapted for implementation with 30 students in a Mexican secondary school. Students showed recurring difficulties constructing ratios, handling percentages, and interpreting quantitative data from nutrition guidelines during the task. Although many completed the procedures correctly, they struggled to use their results for evaluative or decision-making purposes. The findings highlight the importance of contexts that activate the functional use of proportional concepts, allowing mathematics to extend beyond procedural fluency into reasoning that supports everyday decisions. The Impact Sheet to this article is available online at 10.6084/m9.figshare.28723277.