Nutritional recipe calculator and meal planning software for Mac

August 20, 2010 11:15 AM

Seeking recommendations for recipe calculator, nutrition analysis, and meal planning software for Mac. Snowflakeness inside.

I've tried, and liked Spark People but I've grown to hate their, slow recipe calculator, and the fact that all of the recipes I enter aren't stored locally.

I've already purchased SousChef, which doesn't do nutritional info for general recipe organization. Love the website import feature.

I've got a trial version of MacGourmet with their Nutrition calculator plugin, which I like, but it's missing a few features I'd really like: auto-import from pdf or website, and a daily tally of nutritional info.

I'm trying to avoid some frankenstined solution, where MacGourmet calculates nutrition, then I enter it into SparkPeople, which tallies the week/daily totals. I also considered an excel spreadsheet calculator, but I'd like to have some stats on macronutrients as well, so that might mean manually entering 20+ figures per day. If I'm going to be paying $30-40, I'd like the program to do this for me. How do the pros do this?

I don't care at all about recipes, pre made foods, fast food, etc. Not really concerned with tracking what I eat on the go. Most of what this will be used for is calculating nutritional info for home cooked meals, and seeing how a daily and weekly menu looks, nutrition wise.

We're primarily a Mac household, but also have windows (7) and ubuntu dual boots if you've got a great program for those OS. No iPhones, but Android.

posted by fontophilic to Food & Drink (8 answers total)

I use http://nutritiondata.self.com/ to calculate calories and nutrients - they've apparently just been acquired by Self, as the URL has changed from nutritiondata.com to that since the last time I went there. It'll calculate for serving sizes, allow you to input recipes, and give you WAY more micronutrient data that you believed existed.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's got import/export capabilities unless they're hidden somewhere I haven't looked.
posted by telophase at 11:24 AM on August 20, 2010

sorry to respond to a question with a question but what does the snowflake reference mean? i've seen it in other posts.

i wanted to mention that weightwatcher's nutrition tracking tool has really helped me, even when i'm not trying to lose weight it helps me keep track of what i'm consuming and burning (exercise as well). you can subscribe to their online tool.
posted by dmbfan93 at 11:35 AM on August 20, 2010

dmbfan93 - it's a reference to the notion that every snowflake is special and unique. In other words: this question may sound like a common question or just something asked on Ask Metafilter before, but my situation is different.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:18 PM on August 20, 2010

thank you filthy light thief! (sorry fontophilic for hijacking your question with my own!)
posted by dmbfan93 at 12:48 PM on August 20, 2010

I can't compare it with anything else, but a couple of years ago I used and liked Calorie King. I just noticed on their site that you can try them for a week for free.
posted by iscavenger at 12:49 PM on August 20, 2010

I actually use a combination of nutritiondata and fitday for my nutrition info (for free). Nutritiondata has the best info, but only track input fort hat day (unless you pay for it). Fitday allows custom recipes, tracks intake, and outputs some cool graphs as well that give great overviews of macronutrient and vitamin intake.
posted by scrutiny at 1:05 PM on August 20, 2010

I guess I should add that once I've used nutritiondata to calculate the recipe content and import it into fitday, I never have to go back to nutritiondata for that meal and can do everything off of fitday, which avoids the frankenstined solutions after a little effort (which may be too much and not quite what you're looking for)
posted by scrutiny at 1:07 PM on August 20, 2010

Hmm...I use cron-o-meter, and there is a Mac version, but I'm not sure if it's quite what you're looking for. On the other hand it's free, so you can always just give it a try :).
posted by madmethods at 1:19 PM on August 20, 2010