Home cooked meals are often less expensive and more nutritious than their take-out counterparts. However, many recipes do not provide you with the nutritional information for the finished dish. Determining the nutritional content of each serving of your recipe is simple and will only take a few minutes of your time.
Step 1
Look up the nutritional content of each of the ingredients in the recipe in a nutrition guide or looking up the information online by using the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference.
Step 2
Write down the pertinent nutrition details for each ingredient and write them down.
Step 3
Add up the amounts of each nutrient separate from the other nutrients in the recipe. For example, if you were to make a fruit salad with one pound cantaloupe, one pound watermelon and one pound honeydew, you would add the amount of carbohydrates in each of the melons together to determine the total number of carbohydrates in the entire fruit salad. Repeat this step for other nutrients.
Step 4
Divide the total amount of all of the nutrients by the number of servings that the recipe makes. For example, if your recipe makes four servings and totals 2,000 calories, each serving would equal 500 calories.
Things You'll Need
- Nutrition guide
- Paper
- Pen
- Calculator
References
- "Contemporary Nutrition"; Gordon M. Wardlaw and Anne M Smith; 2007
- "Techniques of Healthy Cooking"; The Culinary Institute of America; 2007
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