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1. NA Differs From Other SourcesQ: When I manually import a recipe from Cooking Light magazine, the nutritional analysis comes out completely different! Any ideas? It seems to happen with quite a few. I've found a recipe that came with the SierraHome MasterCook 6.0 Cooking Light edition. It says that a whopping 74% of calories come from fat, but the magazine says it's more like 24%. Big difference! Here's the ingredients: INGREDIENTS FOR 11 SERVINGS: 3/4 (4 pound) beef brisket 1/2 teaspoon pepper 1 cup sliced onion, separated into rings 1/2 cup chili sauce 3 tablespoons brown sugar 2 cloves garlic, crushed 1 (12-ounce) bottle beer 2-1/2 tablespoons all-purpose flour 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons water black pepper (optional) Halved tomato slices (optional) Fresh parsley sprigs (optional) A: I find it's very important to choose the right ingredient from the Ingredient List. Many of the ingredient names don't tell the whole story. We need to open the Ingredient List and read the product description. Find out if the ingredient assumes "roasted chicken with skin" or "dried" not "Fresh" "shiitake" Those two things are the biggest shockers. And "beef!" vs "hamburger" and what was "lean" back when the ingredients were first entered into the USDA database. Often the product I use is "lean beef round steak" -- that is not the same as the "lean hamburger" that is in the database. I think the government data is quite dated. The ingredient list that MasterCook uses is based on government figures. USDA Nutrient Database - Standard Reference Web site Another resource I use a lot: Ingredients Found in the Ingredient List of MasterCook - which lets us find (Hit Ctrl+F while on that web page.) all the ingredients that contain a string like "turkey" -- that helps me identify which ingredient I want to use and how it is worded in the MC Ingredient List. Also, I don't trust the nutritional summaries just because they are printed in magazines. When common sense tells me no way is that 288 calories - it's more like twice that! It often is. I just found one of those this morning. It was a lasagna. It said "serves 4" but it should have said: serves 8. You wrote: "Cooking Light Edition. It says that a whopping 74% of calories come from fat, but the magazine says it's more like 24%. Big difference!" 74 versus 24% CFF? That doesn't surprise me. I guess in 1993 this recipe was considered low fat. This recipe brings up a good example of how we have to edit recipes with meat. Because there is a big difference between what we buy and what we prepare and what we end up eating. Meats are like that - particularly roasts. Plus, this recipe is very complicated. I'm taking clues from the directions: First edit would be the beef: This isn't entirely satisfactory but it's closer. Next we add about 2 cups of liquid: MasterCook doesn't know what a "bottle" is. We need to edit that to 12 ounces bottled beer. Presumably some parts of those 15 ounces of fat and liquid is rendered from the beef are added to the pan drippings. So that's about 4 cups liquid minus whatever evaporated. Aarrgghh! Totally unable to estimate without taking a sample in a lab and testing it. Next we skim that and take 1 1/2 cups of it. Add Cook it until thick, which adds volume. So let's simplify this and assume we get 33 ounces total ( ) So, how can we enter this recipe and improve the estimate? We could separate it into two recipes: the roast and the cooking liquid. But there is no estimate of the fat in those pan juices. We might try to delete the number of servings and enter the ounce-yield instead, but this is more trouble than it is worth. Were you planning on making this recipe? Three ounces is a little high on a low-cholesterol diet. Personally I don't trust that 24% CFF estimate. Not with a brisket of beef and beer and flour and sugar. By the way Betty Crocker explains this way: "You may notice that the nutritional information calculated by MasterCook is different from the nutritional information listed in the Betty Crocker® cookbooks. Because MasterCook and Betty Crocker® use different nutritional analysis programs and different nutrient databases, variations in results are expected." To see a few of what those other programs are go here: Comparison of the Top Nutrition Software Packages You wrote, "I'm new to this program and last night I think I may have stumbled on to something. The ingredients list in the recipe show the beef brisket in "pounds" but my ingredients list in the MasterCook program are all listed in grams. Could this be where the problem is?" Those grams give us the scale we need for individual servings (small). So they are okay as grams with micrograms of cholesterol etc. MasterCook does the math for us. We get more accuracy when we scale upwards. Check out the database the USDA offers us. It will give an idea of the data they provide. Go here: USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference The real problem is the beef. It is an animal product and most of its calories come from animal proteins and fats. [ Top of Page ] 2. Nutrition Checkbox in PreferencesQ. I cannot figure out what difference it makes to have [ ] show nutrition calculation notes on or off. We set it under Preferences. A. It turns the nutritional warning on or off. When we run the Nutrition Analysis, a box pops up and tells us what assumptions MasterCook has to make to calculate the recipe. For example: * garlic (MasterCook assumes an average "whole" size of this ingredient) If we don't want to see these notes each time we analyze a recipe, we turn it off. [ Top of Page ] |
