Nutrition Info on Recipes and Why It Isn’t Included on My Site

Nutrition Info on Recipes and Why It Isn’t Included on My Site

I am asked occasionally for nutrition information on a recipe on my site. Today I’d like to share why it isn’t included on my site and what you can do if this information would be helpful to you. 

1. Ingredients and Substitutions. I don’t include nutrition information on my site because the recipe, as written, may not include the ingredients you choose to use. Especially in the gluten-free community, we are likely to not use the same ingredients. That could be a switch of flour blends, using butter or a vegan/dairy-free substitute, using an egg or an egg substitute. Ten of us could make any recipe on my site and have ten different nutrition info results. 
2. Serving size. Current recommendations for serving size for products that are required to provide nutritional info say the serving size needs to be the amount typically consumed, not a suggested amount. Hence soda serving sizes are now 12 ounces on labels, not 8 ounces. You’ve surely seen the memes about how many servings a container of ice cream contains. I am not qualified to determine how much of anything is typically consumed. You can choose how much you would like to eat. If you are limiting or increasing calories or need to increase or decrease a macronutrient such as fat, protein or carbohydrates, it would be better for you to determine the serving size that best fits your needs. 

If you would find nutrition info on recipes helpful, there are many free options where you can easily and quickly plug the information in on a website. By doing so, you can plug in the exact ingredients you are using. I’ll include links to a few below: 

verywellfit has a nice recipe calorie and nutrition calculator. I used a very early version of this, back when it was called Calorie Count, and it’s only gotten easier to use over time. 

MyFitnessPal has one quite similar to verywellfit, except at the time of writing each ingredient is plugged in individually to create a recipe instead of being able to type it all in one box as on verywellfit.

Whisk has an option that allows you to enter the web address of the recipe, however I don’t find it to be fully functional. Many of the recipes I’ve tested with it come back with a message saying the recipe information was incomplete, even though it’s clearly visible. It may be a resource worth trying at some point. 

I hope you find this information helpful. Nutrition info on recipes is important to some of you and I want you to have the resources that would be of most value.