X% of my Recommended Daily Amount of Y

August 10, 2008 5:54 PM

How do I figure out how nutritious my meals are?

So every packaged food in the supermarket and everything at a restaurant chain has, somewhere, a nutrition chart stating the calories, vitamins, fat, etc. found in a serving of that food. But what about when I cook for myself? How can I replicate that sort of easy to comprehend nutrition information when I'm putting a meal together from many different ingredients? Or is that nutrition information not that great anyway and I should focus on broader nutrition goals? What do we even really know about nutrition? Please help me make sense of the overload of conflicting information that exists out there.

posted by fishmasta to food & drink (6 comments total)

The USDA Nutrient Database has data for all sorts of foods, including nearly all the ingredients you're likely to use in cooking.
posted by lore at 6:05 PM on August 10, 2008

i've always been a big fan of calorie-count.com's recipe analyzer. it's pretty smart, and if it refuses to understand a specific ingredient, google something like "2% milk site:www.calorie-count.com/calories", take the number from the URL (86355 for the Scotsburn 2% milk), and put it into your recipe as "1 cup [86355]". Works like a charm.
posted by soma lkzx at 6:24 PM on August 10, 2008

Various sites will do this. Fitday is one that is targeted at people counting calories, but one that sounds like it might be more useful for what you want to do is NutritionData which will rate a recipe you enter into it based on how it ranks for people trying to lose weight, how filling it is, and a few other interesting stats.

You just add the ingredients for your recipe into your "pantry" and then tell it the amount of each, the serving size, and the recipe name, and it will give you a fairly complete nutritional profile, including a replica of the little chart you see on commercial products.
posted by synecdoche at 6:25 PM on August 10, 2008

Check out Cron-o-meter. It's a free, open source application that does exactly what you need. Plus, it works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Basically, you tell it what you plan to eat, it pulls out the corresponding nutritional information from the USDA database lore mentioned, and tells you the number of calories, amount and proportion of macronutrients, vitamins, minerals and amino acids your food contains. You can view the information per ingredient or as an aggregate for each recipe, meal or day, and it's displayed graphically, which is always nice. You can add your own recipes and foods, so you won't have to retype.

I've only just started playing with it a couple of weeks ago, so I haven't explored all the bells and whistles yet, but it's core features are quickly becoming essential. Highly recommended.

Oh, I see there's an online Java version here!
posted by Cobalt at 6:27 PM on August 10, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Something like this digital kitchen scale with nutritional facts display might be exactly what you are looking for. It comes with a book that lists most common foods and when you weigh your portion you just enter the corresponding code for that food and it will display the nutritional value for the exact portion you are preparing. (it displays it just like a food label.)

Since the serving sizes on the box rarely match the serving size IRL it would not only give you the accurate nutritional information but it would give you a better idea of portion control. (I was shocked to see my "little" bowl of cereal was way more than one serving!)

You can create custom codes for any type of food at all -- you just enter the nutritional information and save it. (And that could be anything from info on a box of packaged food to info from the USDA web site for fruits or vegetables.) Another very cool feature is the ability to keep a running total, so if you are baking a cake from scratch you would enter each ingredient as you out it in the bowl and you'd get the nutritional content of your homemade cake!

A quick disclaimer: I'm not familiar with the exact model that I linked to but it should give you an idea of what I'm talking about.
posted by Room 641-A at 12:01 AM on August 11, 2008

Cronometer has not been very accurate with me in the past. I always err high in all my unmeasured numbers (``Just how much milk did I pour into my oatmeal? eh, let's say a cup.''), but it claims I eat about 1300kcal a day. Now, I'm willing to believe that I miss a banana here and a pat of butter there, but I promise you, no man in the world maintains weight on anything near 1300kcal a day.
posted by d. z. wang at 12:13 PM on August 12, 2008