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D.I.Y. Recipe Nutrition Labels for Free

TransplantedSoul by TransplantedSoul

Nutrition: How Many Calories are in your Recipe?

We are so often told to cut down on junk food and prepared meals to stay healthy. We know that what we eat has a profound impact upon our health, our weight, or fitness, immunity and even the look and condition of our skin. We also know that in order to ensure that we are eating healthy foods, we need to know what goes into them. Sometimes a recipe that seems healthy, might not fit well with your diet plan.

How can you get the facts on nutrition? How do you get the nutrient information related to your recipe? How can you make a good nutrition label? A tool located at www.wolframalpha.com comes to the rescue!

Using these steps, create a professional nutritional analysis of your recipe. If you have a small business selling your own food, this might even be useful to produce some labels for you.

Gather the Information About Your Recipe

Wolframalpha is a fun site that can do many thingsI found a decent recipe here for Mung beans.
This recipe was contributed by ScrumptiousIndia and can be found here: http://www.squidoo.com/mung-beans-recipe .

This recipe calls for:
1 Cup Whole Mung Beans
3-4 cups water
2" piece of ginger root
3-4 cloves of Garlic
1 Medium Onion
2 Green Chillies
2 Tbsp Olive Oil
2 Dried Red Chillies
1/2 tsp Cumin
1/4 tsp Turmeric
1/2 tsp Coriander
1/2 tsp red chilli powder
1/2 tsp salt

So what will this do to my diet plan? Gee it sounds healthy, but what is the impact? Here is where you need to turn to WOLFRAMALPHA at www.wolframalpha.com

Decide What is Significant

The whole recipeFrom your list of ingredients, decide what is important from a nutritional perspective. Things like Chillies, Turmeric Powder and Cumin are unlikely to contribute to the nutritional profile of your recipe. Isolate the main ingredients and get ready to enter those into wolframalpha. In this case, I chose:

1 cup Mung Beans +0.5 oz Ginger +4 cloves garlic +1 onion +0.25 tsp salt+ 2 tbsp olive oil +2cups rice

Click here to see the results in wolframalpha.

Notice how that instead of using fractions, I am using decimals. This is easier for wolframalpha to work with, and also easier for humans if the list gets complex.

If you wanted to do this for a smaller portion size (say four portions per recipe), simply enter the correct amount of each ingredient (eg: 1/4 in this example), and the results will apply to a single portion.

How to Read Nutrition Labels

This short video is a good introduction

Knowing what the basic elements of a nutrition label are can help you make sense of the impact of specific ingredients. Spend a small amount of time and you'll be amazed with what you learn.
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Try a recipe from one of these great sources

or use your own...

Wolframalpha will help you to determine the nutritional content of almost any recipe. For some strange or exotic items, you may need to substitute. Also be sure to read the output to get hints. In the example below, using simply Ginger made it so wolframalpha did not know if this was a name or a food product. Using "ginger root" solved this. Some similar tuning for changing "Whole flour" to "whole-flour" may be needed in some cases.
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Let's Check Out Sylvia's Buttermilk Pie

For added details you can find further explanations Here. This is a really neat tool. Sylvia's pie sounds enticing right?...
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Sylvia's Buttermilk Pie Analysis

I'd love your feedback

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Some Other Sources of Information About This Approach

Wolframalpha is very powerful

Wolframalpha can do so many things. This ranges from complex mathematical formulae, to statistics, recipes and much more. Take a few of the tours on the wolframalpha page to get addicted. As an example, try entering something like this:

(population of France) / (population of Canada)

or

(number of Christians) / (number of Muslims)

- so many things to explore

Here are a few links to articles specifically about nutritional analysis. For the other stuff - you can browse yourself.

Make Smart Choices
Nutrition Calculations
Something to Chew On
Get Calorie Information

A useful write up on this Skin Care Site that has a handy on-line nutrition widget.

Here is an On-Line Nutrition Calculator

(this is also based on Wolframalpha)

Click the calculator to begin

See the interesting write-up on this Skin Care Site that has a handy on-line widget. The rest of this site has some wonderful skin care information too.

If you like this, you can also add it to your own website. It is a widget.

What do you think?

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Don't Forget: You Are What You Eat

(can have a huge impact on skin health)

Don't forget to analyze your recipes and stick to a reasonable daily allowance of things you should restrict (like Sodium), and keep the good things like Selenium within range (around 200 micro-grams - more is not good)
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More detail on Wolframalpha is here:

(with intro videos)

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What about fat?

Is it true that

Fat has many different types

There is total fat, poly unsaturated fat, mono unsaturated fat, trans fat, Omega fatty acids....

Ingredients are often grouped together

A product claims on its label to be a good source of vitamin C

How can you tell the relative content of ingredients

To tell how much sodium a snack will add

Feeling Lucky?

Let me select one of my articles for you.

Picture Title Here
click above

Guestbook Comments

  • daria369 May 24, 2012 @ 3:33 pm | delete
    Lots of new information for me here, thank you! :)
  • acisni Apr 19, 2012 @ 6:07 am | delete
    Thanks for finding Wolframalpha. This is why some lenses are great - new things.
  • TransplantedSoul Apr 23, 2012 @ 12:43 pm | delete
    See a more detailed write-up on Wolframalpha here: Computational Knowledge Engine
  • sandyspider Mar 15, 2012 @ 9:47 am | delete
    Great lens full of information. Never thought of the labels for my recipes. Blessed! Please add this to my Best of St. Patrick's Day lens.
  • Thrinsdream Mar 1, 2012 @ 4:47 pm | delete
    Great lens with some good points highlighted about what to look out for. Liked that! With thanks and appreciation. Cathi x
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TransplantedSoul

Hi from Ottawa Canada! I'm fairly new to Squidoo, and am enjoying allthe rich content and ability to add my own (hopefully) useful stuff.

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