An ingredients list looks like a wall of unfamiliar words, and most people give up on it within a second or two. There is a shortcut. The list is not alphabetical and it is not arranged for marketing. It is ordered by quantity, highest first, all the way down to one percent. Below one percent the order is free, and a manufacturer can arrange those entries however it likes.
That single rule is most of what you need. Read the first five entries and you know roughly what the product is: what it is mostly made of, what is carrying everything else, and what is doing the bulk of the work. Everything after that is present in smaller amounts, and once you pass the one percent mark the sequence stops telling you anything about quantity at all.
The consequence is worth sitting with. A product can put an ingredient on the front of the pack, name it in the product name, and build an entire page of copy around it, while that ingredient sits near the bottom of the list in a quantity that would be hard to measure. Nothing about that is against the rules. The front of the pack is advertising. The list on the back is the specification. When the two disagree, the list is the one that was written under legal obligation.
There is a second thing the order can hide. Two products can share the same headline ingredient and be entirely different products, because one has it high in the list and the other has it after the preservative. You cannot tell them apart from the front of the pack. You can tell them apart in about thirty seconds from the back.
So the method is short. Turn the pack over. Read the first five entries. Find the headline ingredient and note where it sits. If it is near the end, the front of the pack is describing an intention rather than a composition. If you cannot find the list at all without opening the box, that is information too.
None of this requires you to know what the words mean. You do not have to recognise a single ingredient for the position of it to tell you something. Position is the part that is regulated, and position is the part that is hard to dress up.
This is why we will publish our full list rather than a highlight of it.