Nutrition information for my recipes

I always wanted to give nutrition values of my recipes. I did not know how to go about it, when I started this blog. 

 

 Nutrition information will come handy to those of you who want to limit the amount of some ingredients such as salt, fat and carbohydrates. If you know their content you will be able to decrease the quantities of those ingredients given in the recipe. Apart from the salt you add, other ingredients such as vegetables will contain some salt. This nutrition information adds the salt content from all sources. This is also true for fat and other nutrients.  You can also use the nutritional values to compare recipes.

 Some nutrient content is altered by the cooking process. For example, Vitamin C is dissipated when subjected to heat. I cannot compute this. I have simply added the nutrients as given in the national database. It is good to bear this in mind when reading the nutrition information.

 Finally I managed to download the USDA (US Department of Agriculture) Access nutrition database. I wrote a Visual Basic program to transfer nutrition data of my recipe to an Excel spread sheet according to the proportion of ingredients in the recipe. I made one column for each ingredient in Excel so that I can manually check the numbers, if in doubt. Total is worked out by Excel.
 I am giving information for only 40 most common nutrients. USDA list of nutrients is daunting. 
 
 Even after short listing the nutrients, my data table is very long. I know it will be boring for you to scroll down all the way. So I decided to hide the nutrition data. Clicking the Show/Hide button will reveal it, so that those who are not interested may skip it. Clicking on the button again will close this section on nutrition information.

 As time permits, I will update all my past recipes also with nutrition information, in future. Even after some software, preparing nutrition information is still time consuming. There may be some commercial software out there that may do the job easily. I am not aware of any such software.

 If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please comment below or let me know by email – ivyf028@gmail.com. I will keep improving.
Ivy