How to Find Caloric & Nutrient Content of a Recipe
Many people who are serious about nutrition and weight loss do a lot of counting. They count calories burned, calories eaten, carbs taken in, weight lost, weight gained, inches shed, nutritional content and many other metrics. This is easy when you're looking at packaged foods, and even fast food restaurants provide calorie and nutrition information about their products. But when you're looking at a recipe, this information can be a little harder to figure.
Instructions
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Check online to see if the calorie and nutrition content of your recipe has already been calculated. As long as the recipe has similar ingredients, the information should be close enough for your purposes.
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If the recipe calls for canned or other previously prepared food, use the nutrition information on the food labels to gather information about those ingredients. Remember that the information is usually listed per serving. Each package usually contains more than one serving, which may or may not correspond to how much of the food you will use in your recipe.
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Use a calorie calculator to determine the caloric content of any ingredients you couldn't figure out from the labels. You can buy one of these at a bookstore or use a free calculator on the internet.
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Use a nutrition guide to determine the nutrition content of any ingredients you couldn't learn from the labels.
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Total up the caloric and nutrition content of all the individual recipe ingredients.
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Record the totals with your recipe for easy reference next time.
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Tips & Warnings
use a calorie counter
Keep in mind from the beginning that calorie and nutrition counting is an inexact science. Variations in brand of ingredient, preparation and portioning will mean your count will be off slightly. Don't worry about this overly. Your informed estimate will be close enough for the information to be useful.
As with any nutrition or diet program, check with your doctor before trying anything new.
