Nutrition Data on Savvy Vegetarian Recipes
About once a month, I get a request for nutrition data on our vegetarian recipes. This post explains why Savvy Vegetarian, who lives to make visitors happy, balks at adding nutrition data.
Message for Savvy Vegetarian: Thank you for these wonderful vegetarian recipes. Is there a way to get the nutrition data on the Quinoa Black Bean Salad and other recipes? E.g. calories per serving and fat, carb and protein percentages? Thanks! L.N.
Hi L. N., Thanks very much for writing!
You aren’t the first to request nutrition data on Savvy Vegetarian recipes. We can add it, if we hire someone to feed each recipe one ingredient at a time into a site like nutritiondata.com, which will then generate the nutrition data to add to the recipe. It’s time consuming, picky, tedious work and the few people who work on Savvy Vegetarian can always find ten things more pressing to do.
Savvy Vegetarian could also buy a nutrition data analysis program which costs anywhere from $400 to $4000 dollars, and might do the job a little bit faster. Someone would still have to manually enter each item in each recipe.
However we do it, it will be time consuming and expensive to add nutrition data to our recipes. We’ve got it on the list. We just need to find the time and money, plus somebody who’s willing - and able - to do the job!
Personally, l feel that the basic nutrition data for recipes 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, making you analyze every bite you eat, limiting your food choices too much, and interfering with the joy of food.
I agree that it’s good to be aware of what’s in your food, and how much you’re eating. And sometimes, it can be helpful to check the nutrition data for your diet, if you want to gain or lose weight, have food allergies, or your health isn’t what it should be. But in those cases, a much more detailed, individual nutrition data analysis is needed than calories, fat, carbs and protein - along with professional help. And we can’t provide that.
Savvy Vegetarian recipes generally are balanced and nutritious. And, if you are eating a diet of fresh whole foods with plenty of fruits and vegetables, 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 give you a pretty good idea of the basic nutrition data - calories, fat, carbs and protein. For instance, if you know that fats have on average 50 calories per tsp, and there’s a Tbsp of oil in the recipe, that’s going to add up to 150 calories.
As a compromise, until we can add nutrition data to our recipes, I suggest that you use 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 vegetarian nutrition references which every vegetarian or vegan should own.
To sum up, there are good reasons why so few vegetarian recipes online (including ours) have nutrition data!
Judith Kingsbury, Savvy Vegetarian
Tags: calories, carbs, fat, nutrition, nutrition data, protein, Savvy Vegetarian, vegan, vegetarian, vegetarian nutrition, vegetarian recipes
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I use a very affordable program called Diet Power. It tracks my dietary intake (a food log) and provides an easy tool to add your own recipes and summarize nutrition.
It’s affordable, easy, and I love the software. No, I am not paid by Diet Power or anyone else to promote it. This is my personal opinion.
As well, my Recipe Software has tools to track recipe nutrition. It’s called BigOven and it, too, is quite affordable.