Follow my journey in my first experiment calculating the information for nutrition labels for my recipes. I am using the example of how I calculated the approximate nutritional value for my Delicious Buckwheat Risotto with Spring Vegetables recipe. I am still perfecting my calculations and rounding methods, so I may update this label periodically. Still, it gives a great overview of the nutrients in this dish for those of your who are curious.
These are my own calculations and have not been reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It’s just a method I developed for estimating the nutrients in my recipes based on the information available to me. While a few tweaks might be in order, I believe this method I developed may be more accurate than some automatic nutrition label calculators. So, let’s dive in!
My Experience with Automatic Nutrition Label Makers
I’ve tried out a few automatic nutrition label makers – some that are free online and some paid ones that allow you to sign up for a free trial. I was really curious about these tools since I had noticed several other food bloggers using them to get nutrition facts for their recipes. Plus, my family had been inquiring about the per-serving nutrition of my recipes. So I began searching for a way to develop the most accurate report I could.
Now, what I noticed when trying to use several of these automatic label makers is that they don’t always understand the ingredients that you input. For instance, they really messed up the nutrition facts on the two 15 oz. cans of cannellini that I used. Consequently, the resulting nutrition label made it seem like this recipe contained far more sodium and calories than it does. While you are supposed to be able to go back in and manually correct any errors on these label makers, there’s not always an option that matches up perfectly with the ingredients that you used.
After this experience with the automatic label makers, I decided to try calculating the nutrients myself using a Numbers spreadsheet. (For those of you who don’t know, Numbers is the Apple version of Excel, where you create spreadsheets and enter formulas to perform various calculations on your data.) Then, I designed a nutrition label for my recipe using InDesign. This is a time-consuming process, but I believe it gets closer to the accurate nutrition facts for the specific ingredients, amounts, and brands that I use in my recipes.
Setting up the Spreadsheet
First, I created a spreadsheet in Numbers with a column for nutrients and columns for each of the different ingredients I used. I pulled up the nutrition facts for the first ingredient, Imagine Vegetable Broth, online and added all the nutrients listed in the column for nutrients. Then, I used the formula =SUM(x*1.75) for each of the nutrients on the label to multiply by 1.75 servings. For instance, 1 cup of Imagine Vegetable Broth has 20 calories as listed on their nutrition label, so the 1 3/4 cups I used in my recipe would be 1.75 times as much, or 35 calories.
When I pulled up the nutrition label online for the next ingredient, Eden Buckwheat, I added rows to the nutrients column. This was for the new nutrients found on the buckwheat label but not on the broth label. I continued adding new rows on the nutrient column as appropriate for each ingredient.
For the produce, I just looked up the nutritional information on the USDA website. I have linked to these pages below in case you want to check them out for yourself:
Turnips, raw – 1 medium (122 g)
Beets, raw – 1 beet (2″ dia) (82 g)
Onions, sweet, raw – 1 onion (331 g)
Leeks, (bulb and lower leaf-portion), raw – 1 leek (89 g)
Notably, all of the information about amino acids on my nutrition label came from these pages. I may remove that from my label as some people are touchy about publishing amino acid profiles for accuracy reasons. However, I just thought it was interesting that the USDA lists these amino acids in some of the veggies I used in this recipe.
Converting grams, micrograms, etcetera to percentages
One thing that makes the USDA pages a little trickier to work with than a nutrition label on a product is that some of the nutrients are listed in grams, micrograms, etcetera, but not percentages. When you create nutrition labels, you want to have both the grams, micrograms, etcetera and the percentages. This being the case, I decided to set up a proportion to convert these measurements into percentages. In order to to this, I had to look up the recommended daily values for each nutrient.
Links to Daily Nutritional Value Information
Calories/How to Read Nutrition Labels – Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Total Fat and Other Daily Values – FDA
A Vitamin – Daily Value – National Institute of Health (NIH)
Thiamin B1 – Daily Value – NIH
Riboflavin B2 – Daily Value – NIH
Pantothenic Acid B5 – Daily Value – NIH
Pyridoxine B6 – Daily Value – NIH
Cyanocobalamin B12 – Daily Value – NIH
Phosphorus – Daily Value – NIH
Now for betaine, beta carotene, lutein, and the amino acids, I could not find a recommended daily value online, so I did not calculate a percentage for those. I simply typed in the milligrams, micrograms, or whatever unit of measurement was provided. I think for some of these nutrients, there might not be a recommended daily value because the amount needed might vary greatly from person to person.
Sample Proportion and Spreadsheet Formula for Percentage
Below is an example of a proportion I set up for one of these calculations, specifically my calculation for the vitamin C in turnips:
x/100 = 25.6 mg/90 mg
x/100(100/1) = 25.6 mg/90 mg(100/1)
x = 2560/90 = 28.44…
rounded to 28% vitamin C in one medium turnip
Then, I typed the following formula into Numbers to calculate the amount in three medium turnips since that’s how many I used in the recipe:
=SUM(28%*3)
The result was 84% vitamin C in three medium turnips.
Figuring Complicated Ingredient Amounts
Some of the ingredient amounts were quite complicated. For instance, the buckwheat, where I used 1 1/3 cup in my recipe. A serving size, according to the nutrition label for buckwheat is 1/4 cup. Thus in order to develop a fraction by which to multiply the nutrients, I had to go through the following calculations:
1 cup = 3/3
3/3 + 1/3 = 4/3
1/4x = 4/3
1/4x(4/1) = 4/3(4/1)
x = 16/3
Basically, I had to do this to figure out how many 1/4 cups equal 1 1/3 cups. Then, I was able to take the resulting fraction 16/3 and multiply the nutrients by that value. For instance, to determine the fiber content in the amount of buckwheat I put in this recipe, I used the following formula in Numbers:
=SUM(1*(16/3))
This is because a serving of buckwheat, 1/4 cup, contains one gram of fiber. When multiplied by the fraction, 16/3, the result is 5.3333…. grams of fiber in 1 1/3 cup.
Calculating the Totals and Per Serving Amounts
Once I had calculated all the nutrients for each ingredient in my recipe, I created a totals column to add up all the nutrients in the entire recipe and a per serving column to calculate the nutrients in each serving. For the totals column, I used a formula to create a sum of all the ingredient columns for each row. Here’s an example:
=SUM(C3:P3)
This formula was to calculate the calories in the entire batch of risotto that I made, 2,539.6666….
As for the per serving column, I used a formula to divide the number from the totals column by eight since the recipe yielded eight servings:
=SUM(Q3/8)
This gave me the number of calories per serving, 317.483333333334, which I rounded to the nearest whole number, 317.
Vitamin Percentages Considerations
Now, calculating the percentages for some of these vitamins was confusing. I ended up calculating the percentage, rounding it, then applying that percentage to the daily value to get the number of milligrams, micrograms, etcetera for the label. Thinking back on it, this is extra work in a way and may not have actually been the absolute most accurate way to do this. While the percentages would be accurate to the nearest whole number, or tenth, or however I chose to round them, the number of milligrams, micrograms, etcetera may have been altered in this calculation process. It may have been more accurate to just leave these numbers as milligrams, micrograms, etcetera in this spreadsheet and then create a separate spreadsheet to convert them to percentages. That way, I would only be working with the milligrams, micrograms, etcetera once rather than converting to percentages and then converting back to the original unit of measurement. Still, I think I probably arrived at a fairly accurate representation of these nutrients. I’ll try the other method soon and see if it makes any difference.
Daily Values for Different Demographics
So far, I have created my nutrition labels for recipes based on the standard 2,000 calorie diet and the daily value of nutrients for adult men as I have found to be the standard used for nutrition facts labels. I know! So sexist, right?!! Jk. Idk. I may try to create different versions of nutrition labels for my recipes based on daily values for women, children, etcetera at some point. If you’re really curious about the recommended daily values of nutrients for these different demographics, this information is available on the NIH health professional fact sheets that I linked to earlier in this article. Anyhow, I believe I have come up with a pretty good first attempt at a standard nutrition label for my recipes. Yay! But I’ll continue to fine tune it. Yay! Lol, stay tuned!