olivetalks

In the previous post I explained how to calculate nutrition values of food using the labels on the food packaging. That was quite simple maths but the interesting fact is that for many foods the nutritional values are printed on the packaging and that makes them easy to find.

Some other foods don’t come with these numbers. For example let’s say you buy some eggs, few bananas, carrots and a 300 g beef steak. All of them might come without a label explaining the nutrition values. How can you find out how many calories, proteins, etc. will you be consuming?

I usually start with google for this kind of questions. Simply type something like “eggs nutritional values” into the search box and you’ll find some useful information. About eggs. Then you need to repeat the same for bananas, carrots and beef steak. Pretty boring, huh? That’s why I’m posting here links to pages which contain information about multiple foods so you don’t have to spend 20 minutes trying to figure out what’s in your dinner.

The web pages with nutritional values come in two flavours – charts and databases.

Charts – these web pages contain tables containing information about multiple foods usually all on one page. They are simple, quick to use tables but usually contain less entries than databases. To search use the “Find in this page” feature of your web browser – usually it can be activated by pressing Ctrl+F.

• Mike’s Calorie and Fat Gram Chart for 1000 foods
• Food Nutrition Counts at fitwise.com
• Calories in Fast Food
• Calorie Chart for Healthy Food
• Calorie Chart from bodybuilding site elitefitness.com
• Food Nutrition Tables (this is actually a set of multiple tables with few thousands of entries)

Databases – on these pages you can search for a specific food by entering its name. Usually contain more entries than charts.

• CalorieKing
• a Calorie Counter
• USDA National Nutrient Database

Try finding out what’s in your next meal