Does anyone know if there is a program or website out there into which you can plug basic data from a recipe (ingredients, number of servings, etc.) that will calculate calories and fat grams per serving? I have a lot of recipes that don’t provide this information, and it’s a major pain to have to calculate from the ingredients (especially if, like me, you’re a bit math challenged!).
When I’m queen of the world, I swear, I’m going to require every cookbook out there to provide nutritional data!
The UK site has a more prominently displayed calorie-counter, but looks like you have to sign-up for it.
My wife, who is a weightwatchers veteran, tells me that the weightwatchers site will do something similar, but it calulates weightwatchers points rather than calories, and you have to become a member.
Individual ingredients aren’t the problem. Most of that information is available on-line (you can easily Google on, for example “calories in lentils” or “calories in brown rice” and find a wealth of information). But calculating how much of each ingredient is in a serving and then figuring the calories and fat grams from that is a major pain.
I’ll have a look at some of those packages reviewed. I’d rather not get something that includes a “cookbook” (I can’t eat most of the recipes they would offer), but if I have to, I will.
I have MasterCook Deluxe (a few years old, not the newest version) and it’s a good program. The only problem with calculating the calories/nutrition stuff in a recipe is if an ingredient isn’t one they have programmed. Then they just don’t include that ingredient in the analysis.
Hmmm…does it have the option to add ingredients that haven’t been preprogrammed?
For example, I use tempeh a lot, and it’s not a terribly mainstream ingredient. It would be easy enough to get the nutritional information and plug it in, though, if the program allows for that.
At the moment I am leaning heavily toward MasterCook Deluxe, as the ingredients inventory feature also sounds useful.
It seems the problem is much like trying to find some foods on the Glycemic Index. If no-one has paid for the analysis to be done, the data you may need just doesn’t exist.
Hmmm…I can’t think of many foods I eat for which nutritional data isn’t available. Tempeh, for example, comes packaged with the nutritional info right on the label, just as other packaged foods do (btw, 220 cal. and 9 gm fat per 4 oz. serving, in case anyone’s curious). It’s just that, if I use it in a casserole or a stir fry, it’s hard to calculate how much is in any given serving (chances are you won’t eat a whole 4 ounces of tempeh if you’re eating it along with a lot of rice and vegetables).
Other than the tempeh, I can’t really think of anything I cook with that most other folks don’t. I’m a whole foods cook, for the most part.
I don’t think you can add the non-programmed stuff, but honestly I haven’t goofed around with it that much. I did check and tempeh is one of the ingredients in there. Also, since my version is a few years old, it’s very possible the newer version does stuff mine won’t.
Most of the problem I have found is HOW you enter the ingredient - for example, I have a recipe that calls for “swiss or cheddar cheese”. The program doesn’t recognize that as an ingredient, can’t process the info. Also, if you enter something like “shredded cheddar cheese”, it won’t recognize it, you have to enter it as “cheddar cheese” and then under the column headed “prep” put “shredded”. Also, some herbs and spices aren’t recognized, but those won’t change the nutritional info much.
Yay! I just downloaded MasterCook Deluxe 9, and it’s just what I was hoping for. Thanks guys!
There is one oddity, which I ought to ask them about. I just entered my favorite lentil/rice recipe (it’s to die for…I get cravings for it on a regular basis), and the nutritional info seems right except for one thing…it says that each serving contains 2mg of cholesterol! As this is a totally vegan recipe (and as plant products don’t contain cholesterol), it’s actually cholesterol-free. It does contain fat, to be sure (from a small amount of olive oil, and whatever miniscule amount of fat that naturally occurs in lentils, rice, herbs and veggie stock), but not much (about 9 grams/serving), and none of it is saturated, hydrogenated, or of animal origin. I wonder where they’re coming up with the cholesterol number?
Still, the important thing is that it tells me exactly what i need to know, and makes it easy to import my recipes. Yippee!
I, on the other hand, went for Living cookbook. It’s so easy to use. I took one of the included recipes, copied and pasted into a new recipe and modified it for what we have in the cupboards and it recalculated the nutrition info automatically.
Actually, cholesterol does NOT occur in plants. There are plant sterols, but they aren’t cholesterol.
From the American Heart Association website:
People get cholesterol in two ways. The body — mainly the liver — produces varying amounts, usually about 1,000 milligrams a day. Foods also can contain cholesterol. Foods from animals (especially egg yolks, meat, poultry, shellfish and whole- and reduced-fat milk and dairy products) contain it. Foods from plants (fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts and seeds) don’t contain cholesterol.
Certain plant-based foods can raise serum cholesterol (coconut and palm kernal oil, for example), but they don’t contain cholesterol themselves.
Cholesterol and Plants
Journal of Chemical Education, v82 n12 p1791 Dec 2005
E. J. Behrman and Venkat Gopalan
Department of Biochemistry, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/
I have observed cholesterol isolated from potatoes in the lab by one of my buds? What impact this has on cholesterol levels in humans?
“Dietarily insignificant” being the operative phrase. Which is why it’s perfectly correct, for all practical purposes, to say that “plant foods don’t contain cholesterol”…there’s not enough to make our bodies so much as hiccup, and absolutely no justification for claiming 2 mg of cholesterol in a dish consisting of lentils, brown rice, and vegetable stock.
Interestingly, I just entered a peanut-butter-based pasta dish, and it actually used the words “dietarily insignificant” for that one. Maybe there’s a glitch in the programming.