Ever wonder how to reduce the fat, sodium, carbs or calories in a recipe?
A key step in tailoring a recipe to your own dietary preferences is knowing which ingredients contribute the most calories, fat, carbs, sodium or protein. Then, you can consider substitutes for that ingredient, reduction in the amount or alternate variations.
Starting today, we’re making that much easier. BigOven PRO members can now “look inside” recipes with Nutrition Insights™. The Nutrition Insights page gives you a nutritional breakdown, by ingredient for any recipe.
How To View Nutrition Insights
Visit any recipe page on www.bigoven.com and log in with your BigOven PRO membership. Then, simply click on the word “Insights” in the nutrition table, and BigOven will show you a line-by-line analysis of where your recipe gets most of its calories, fat, protein and sodium, in an easy-to-read, graphical format:
Sample
Let’s examine Broiled Salmon with Artichoke in Lemon Shallot Sauce. With Nutrition Insights, we can quickly see which ingredients contribute the most calories, fat, protein, carbohydrates, sodium and overall weight to the recipe:
How to Read the Insights Chart
The ingredients are listed as rows, and the key nutritional elements are listed as columns. For any given box, BigOven displays the per-serving calculated total for that ingredient. The larger the circle — and the brighter the color — the greater its percent contribution to the overall total for that column. So, if you’re simply looking for the biggest contributors, just pick the column(s) you care most about and locate the largest, brightest circle.
For instance, for the Chicken and Bacon Shish Kebobs recipe above, sodium watchers would quickly notice that the bacon in the recipe accounts for more than half of the overall sodium of this particular recipe. Reducing, removing, or substituting this bacon would likely dramatically cut the sodium, calorie, and fat total for the recipe.
Notice that “skewers”, the last line, has no nutrition information, since they have not been linked in – they are (we sure hope!) not an edible part of the recipe.
Nutrition Summary Also Available
BigOven PRO members have been able to see Nutrition facts right next to the recipe page on BigOven.com, as follows:
Sesame-Crusted Ahi Tuna – it’s all in the dressing!
Taking a look at a second Nutrition Insights page, this for Sesame-Crusted Ahi Salad, you can quickly see that the calories, fat, and sodium all largely stem from the dressing, not the ahi or the salad itself.
Nutrition Linking Status – Work Continues!
BigOven has well over 200,000 recipes online, and an average of 7 ingredients per recipe – well over 1.7 million ingredients to link up. Not every single one of them is fully nutritionally-linked, though the vast majority are, and most of our most frequently-viewed ones are. We’re linking the remaining (and newly edited ones) rapidly, and further tuning our auto-linking system.
PRO members can help us link in more nutrition information with the steps described in this technote: How to Calculate Nutrition Information for a Recipe You’ve Added.
When you add a new recipe, after about 4 hours, the nutrition linking daemon should hit your recipe and link up what it can. The more you enter your ingredient lines in “standard” form – e.g., with the quantity, unit, name and prepnotes in the proper boxes, the greater accuracy the automatic linker will have in finding the relevant nutritional item and weight. To inspect the nutrition link, simply click on the bullet to the left of the ingredient line.
Nutrition Insights: Now in Beta for all BigOven PRO members
Nutrition Insights is a BigOven PRO feature only. It is now in beta on our website; it is not yet available in our mobile apps. Have questions or comments? Please drop us a note.
Add Your Own Recipes – Get Nutrition Insights!
Remember, BigOven is all about letting you build and organize your own recipe collection, and Nutrition Insights are available for those recipes you add. You can finally find out just how many calories are in that apple strudel recipe – or how much protein is in that smoothie, and find ways to make it even better for you. It’s free to join BigOven and add recipes, but to gain Nutrition Insights and loads of other great features, you need to be a BigOven PRO member.
