Where to find nutrition information for general foods?

Question

Counting calories is one thing, but trying to keep track of things like fat, protein, fiber, and carbohydrates are just as important in a good overall exercise plan. It's not that hard to find nutrition information on processed foods, but when you buy fresh produce and the like it's a lot harder to find the information. NOTE: This is about everyday food (fruits, vegetables, meats, etc.), not fast food.

Has anybody found a good resource for (a) finding out nutrition information of food that do not normally come in packaging with that information, and possibly (b) being able to track that information for diet purposes (or combining them for recipes to find overall information)?

I've looked at http://nutritiondata.self.com/ before, but I've found a number of great healthy recipes have ingredients that it doesn't have or are difficult to find. Also trying to build out a recipe is quite time consuming if there's more than a few ingredients (especially if you have to go through the process of converting units to fit the site's need).

Perhaps this is a start: http://www.whfoods.com/foodstoc.php — wdypdx22, Mar 08 '11 at 23:52

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 08 '11 at 23:14

Wolfram|Alpha has nutritional information for a wide variety of foods. Just type in the food and the amount, and it will tell you the carbs, protein, fat, calories, etc.

For example: 50 g apples:

apples

It even works for things like raw ingredients, so if you know how much flour, sugar, and butter you put in a recipe, you could tally up each of those quantities, to get the total nutritional info for that recipe. For example, 2 cups flour + 1 cup butter + 2/3 cup brown sugar.

Wow, finally a use case for Wolfram Alpha that is beyond the "gee, that was cool to try" factor! — Agent_9191, Mar 08 '11 at 23:30

going · Answer 2 · 2011-03-08T22:51:15.260

It's hard to find nutritional info on fruits and veg. because they are not written on the side of the packet in the supermarket so it's something you will need to research for yourself.

About.com has the breakdown on many foods including fruit and veg. here are the links:

Nutrition information for individual fruits

Nutrition information for vegetables

For more detailed information including meats and recipes, check out this link:

http://caloriecount.about.com/

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 08 '11 at 22:57

2

I have used DailyBurn and MyFitnessPal. I currently use Myfitnesspal. Here are the features I recall.

DailyBurn

Create/find food
Create your own recipe
Get USDA information on raw foods
Enter/track more vitamin and minerals on full web browser version

MyFitnessPal

Create/find food
Create your own recipe
Create your own meal
Find raw foods searching for "[FOOD] raw", example: carrot raw
Verify nutrition information (accuracy)

answered Mar 08 '11 at 22:57

Andrew Ferk

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Please note that the question is a two parter, and Agent_9191 wants to know where the data can also be tracked. It seems DailyBurn would be a good fit, as it used the USDA database for raw foods and allows you to track them. However, the USDA database is not 100% accurate on all foods, as I have seen in the past :( – Andrew Ferk Mar 08 '11 at 23:33

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 09 '11 at 18:11

http://www.livestrong.com is the best of the others I've tried. It allows user data and has a decent user interface unlike the competition. It'd be nice if they could all get together and offer a single database instead of the 5-6 bad ones you get now.

Another place to try is mysupermarket, for example an Apple

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 08 '11 at 22:48

I like the layout of http://nutritiondata.self.com/ quite well, but I agree that it's missing a lot of common ingredients to recipes. The most holistic list I've ever found is the one maintained by the FDA. It doesn't have as nice an interface, but I've found it to be incredibly comprehensive.

Where to find nutrition information for general foods?

5 Answers5