Elaine said to me recently, "I want to start counting calories". This made a change from, "Wendell, I am not content" so, knowing how tricky it is to get reliable information on this, I created this website. Mostly for her but anybody is welcome to use it.
The site uses data from McCance and Widdowson's Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset published 2015-03-25. Information on this can be found at this Government website. The actual dataset, as an Excel spreadsheet, can be downloaded from there. There is also a guide for users which I encourage you to read.
You should, perhaps, start with the instructions and then go to the recipe builder page. Alternatively, you can go to the recipe examples page which has worked examples.
Lots! To start with, the original database - COFID - is based on a sample of food products. Food is a natural product and varies, sometimes quite a lot. You will notice they are three entries for whole milk: summer, winter and average. Other foods vary too.
Then there is the uncertainty about how much of a food is actually in a recipe. I have a bit of a moan about that in the examples but, truthfully, if you don't need to count calories you should probably be cooking with a degree of freedom, panache, style, and not be worrying about grams of this or that. But you do want to count calories so carry on!
Then, finally, you get your meal for six people and dish it up. Did you really give everyone exactly the same amount? This program divides by the number of servings to give a final result. And that implicitly assumes everybody gets exactly the same. Doesn't happen in our house and we tend not to keep track of the left-overs either.
Not only that but most of the recipes are given as "serves 6-8" or similar. Even Jamie's Beef Rendang which also tells you that there are 563 calories per portion. When I put these recipes into the recipes page I use the lower number.
So, in the end, you can weigh the ingredients (and plug the numbers into our recipe builder page) and weigh the served portions too but the end result can only be a guide. So don't lose your pleasure in eating by worrying about calories too much.
Because our database is simply about the composition of food you can use it to make comparisons of the nutrient value of different food stuffs. For example, someone told Elaine that there are fewer carbohydrates in sweet potatoes than in ordinary potatoes. Is this true? Click here to find out. This table was created by simply selecting various entries from the database and leaving the quantity at the default of 100 grams. You ignore the 'Totals' line. In this case it doesn't mean anything. You can see that the analysis says there are fewer calories and fewer carbohydrates in potatoes than in sweet potatoes. At least weight for weight. If you make a custom selection (see the instructions) that includes water then you see that there is a higher proportion of water in potatoes and even higher in new potatoes.
What to do? We recall the words of Darrell Huff, the writer on statistics: "A difference is only a difference when it makes a difference." So are the differences between potatoes and sweet potatoes enough to make a difference? I'd say not. You will draw your own conclusion.
If you feel the need to talk to me about something you can email me here: