Nutrition Data on Savvy Vegetarian Recipes
Message for Savvy Vegetarian: Thank you for these wonderful recipes. Is there a way to also get the nutritional value on the Quinoa Black Bean Salad (and others)? For example the calories per serving and the fat, carb and protein percentages? Please let me know. Thanks! L.N.
Hi L. N., Thanks very much for writing! You aren’t the first to bring this up.
There is a way to add nutrition data to our recipes, and that is to hire someone to feed each recipe one ingredient at a time into a site like nutritiondata.com, which will then generate a printable nutrition label to add to the recipe.
Or we can buy our own nutrition analysis program which costs anywhere from $400 to $4000 dollars, but will do the job a little bit to a lot faster. Either way, it will be time consuming and expensive to add nutrition data to our recipes. We are willing to do it - we just need to find the time and money!
Personally, l feel that the basic nutrition label for foods is not all that useful, in deciding what and how much you should eat. Counting calories, grams of fat, protein and carbs can actually be counterproductive, interfering with the joy of food. But of course, not everybody feels the same way!
I agree that it’s good to be aware of what’s in your food, and how much you’re eating. And sometimes as a reality check, it can be helpful to check the stats on your diet, if you want to gain or lose weight, or have allergies, or your health isn’t what it should be. But in those cases, a much more detailed, individual nutritional analysis is needed, along with professional help. And we can’t provide that.
Savvy Vegetarian recipes generally are nutritionally well balanced. And, if you are eating a diet of fresh whole foods with plenty of fruits, veg, whole grains and legumes, and not too much fat & sugar, you’ll be well nourished. A little knowledge about common ingredients, along with common sense, will tell you at a glance the basic nutrition info about a recipe.
As a compromise, until we can do this for our recipes, I suggest using a free online service like nutritiondata.com which will generate a detailed nutritional analysis of any recipe or individual food. Also, the books Becoming Vegetarian, or Becoming Vegan, by Melina & Davis, are extremely useful nutrition references which every vegetarian or vegan should own.
If anyone has suggestions or opinions about this topic, we’d love to hear from you.
Judith Kingsbury, Savvy Vegetarian
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