Whole Foods Calorie Lookup

To the administartors of Calorie Count.

I often get very frustrating with this website when looking up foods. It would seem you have hundreds of listing of brand-name, boxed food items. You don' t supply information on calories for a lot of whole-unprocessed foods. And simply don't have have a lot of items in said database.

 Now granted the typical north american diet is laden with this packaged, preprocessed, glutamate saturated, salt infested high calorie foods; I just really feel as an advocote of healthy eating you should shift the focus to INCLUDE simple whole foods that don't have labels on them. When I buy a chicken, it doesn't come with a label on it with nutritional information; when I cook a leg&thigh from that chicken I can't find such a combination on this sight to tell me nutritional info. When I make a mayonaise, it's VERY hard to determine calorie content here.

As a chef, and an advocate of whole foods and scratch cooking, this sight is very counter-intuitive when I build recipes into my daily food intake. I have no idea what you mean when you say "cooked with salt" or "cooked without salt" - how much salt? what kind of salt? when I cook vegetables I always salt the water to STOP the transmission of flavour from the vegetable into the water (correcting PH balance - 1st step in learning how to cook!!), but the amount of sodium absorbed by the food is neglible.

Sadly, your competitors are all just as bad. I believe it is a fault of the database of food items someone bought to be used for the web engine. I enter data into 3 different sites and see the exact same description so I know it's all coming from the same source (and I would actually love to know that source BTW).

I would gladly donate my time to a web engineer to help them fix these issues.

Chef Gregory

I cook most things I eat from scratch and I use the recipe analyser on this site.  I've never not been able to find a fresh ingredient in the database here.  Instead of looking for prepared meals in the database, plug your raw ingredients into the analyser.  I attach a link as an example.

http://caloriecount.about.com/aoifes-lemon-gr ass-tofu-burgers-recipe-r247979

you can save and tag your recipies and enter into your food log very easily.  You will find instructions on how to use this tool in the recipes forum

Edit: Also - adding salt to water (or anything) does not alter the pH...

 

Hi Gregory, I know it must be frustrating for a chef, but I think that CC has done a good job of structuring its database for laypeople.  I too have been confused in the past by the distinction between "cooked with salt" and "cooked without salt," but I think they've just estimated how much salt someone might use, and any difference between the estimate and reality is so small as to be negligible.  I find that to be true, anyway. 

As someone who is trying to find out exactly to the milligram how much salt (or some other ingredient) is in something, you may have to resort to hand calculations with a very accurate kitchen scale.  Or, as demerara suggests, make frequent use of the recipe analyzer that will allow you to put in your own very exact amounts. 

I'm curious what ingredients you haven't been able to find in the database?  The only ones I've ever found lacking are foreign processed products not available in North America.  Even if I'm looking for something like dragon fruit, there may not be a generic entry for it, but I can generally find it under "Melissa's" or some other brand name.

I don't mean to diminish the value of your post, because I think it's great you're offering your time to help make CC better!  Thank you!

Rarely am I unable to find the food I'm looking for in the CC data base.  I just looked up chicken legs and there were numerous entries; same thing with thighs, breasts, etc.  I'm a little confused as to why you're unable to find the foods you're looking for.  Maybe I'm just not understanding your question.

Original Post by demerara:

I cook most things I eat from scratch and I use the recipe analyser on this site.  I've never not been able to find a fresh ingredient in the database here.  Instead of looking for prepared meals in the database, plug your raw ingredients into the analyser.  I attach a link as an example.

http://caloriecount.about.com/aoifes-lemon-gr ass-tofu-burgers-recipe-r247979

you can save and tag your recipies and enter into your food log very easily.  You will find instructions on how to use this tool in the recipes forum

Edit: Also - adding salt to water (or anything) does not alter the pH...

 

Thanks; I will check out the recipe analyzer. I am new to this site and it's various tools - although I am not new to cooking; been working in professional kitchens for 20 years.

Salt traps and or creates barriers to flavour. Perhaps Ph (the alkalinity) was the wrong term I used; but if you boil potatoes in unsalted water you move the flavour of the potato into the water (the principle used when makes soups) and inversely by salting the water you are keeping the flavour of the potato in itself.

Here are some excellent references;

http://www.amazon.ca/Food-Cooking-Science-Lor e-Kitchen/dp/0684800012/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&am p;s=books&qid=1251479188&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.ca/Molecular-Gastronomy-Exp loring-Science-Flavor/dp/0231133138/ref=sr_1_ 2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251479258& sr=1-2  

Thamas Keller of 'The French Laundry' (sorry I can't get this font back to normal) in his book of the same name tells people to have their blanching water as salty as the sea. And his restaurant 'Per Se' in NY was voted the best restaurant in the whole of the USA.

 

Cheers

Gregory Bastow

chef - I agree that the search engine is set up to give a lot of the brand name foods first. But once you've done a search, under the list of foods, you'll see another search box, and you can click the box that says "Limit to generic items"

That can help filter out the "whole foods" from the prepackaged ones.

There are certain things that you should ignore - like when you type in a food, it will try to give you a "healthy" alternative - and it's often worse than what you are logging.

These are flaws, but easy to work around.

Original Post by robin9395:

Rarely am I unable to find the food I'm looking for in the CC data base.  I just looked up chicken legs and there were numerous entries; same thing with thighs, breasts, etc.  I'm a little confused as to why you're unable to find the foods you're looking for.  Maybe I'm just not understanding your question.

OK, I'll explain in more detail. I entered "Chicken Legs" and got this (with generic items only selected - thaks for that suggestion!)

1. B-  Chicken, Leg - Meat And Skin, Cooked, Fried, Batter
2. B   Chicken, Leg - Meat And Skin, Cooked, Fried, Flour
3. B   Chicken, Leg - Meat And Skin, Cooked, Roasted
4. B-  Chicken, Leg - Meat And Skin, Cooked, Stewed
5. B-  Chicken, Leg, Meat Only - Cooked, Fried
6. B-  Chicken, Leg, Meat Only - Cooked, Roasted
7. B-  Chicken, Leg, Meat Only - Cooked, Stewed
8. B   Chicken, broilers or fryers, leg, meat and skin, raw

So I wanted information for legs & thigh, skinless and roasted. When I roast skinless chicken leggs I season it and rub a small amount of olive oil on it. I don't use the fried data as that is a LOT of oil, stewed could be cooked in any liquid so I have either #6 or #8 to choose from. if I choose 8, I have 3 choices  a) 1 Cup chopped or diced (140g) b) 1 Unit (yeild from 1lb ready to cook chicken) (57g) c) 1 Leg boned skin removed (95g) now is this data for thigh+drumstick? item a confuses me as cups are volume measurement and grams are weight measurements. Item C leads me to think this is NOT including thigh as 95g is roughly the weight of a drumstick. Why can't we have simple "Chicken, Dark Meat (Per Gram) Steamed-Cooked"; None of us are eating the bones so why does it matter?   Another piece of this mising data is wine - when you cook with it and evaporate the alcohol the calories almost dissapear as that is where they all live - this information doesn't exist here either.    I get the impression this forum is only here to appease us members and the actual operators of this website are not involved. Cheers Gregory Bastow  

 

 

 

 

 

Original Post by chefgregory:

  Another piece of this mising data is wine - when you cook with it and evaporate the alcohol the calories almost dissapear as that is where they all live - this information doesn't exist here either.   

You can always suggest that they add the data, but it's possible that things like this are too difficult to calculate - the alcohol burns off... but what if you don't let it cook quite as long, and some of the alcohol remains - how do you calculate that? Or would it just overwhelm the system (there are already so many options for chicken - more would be so confusing). As another option, you could log wine, but only a quarter of the actual amount you added (or more or less).

I get the impression this forum is only here to appease us members and the actual operators of this website are not involved. Cheers Gregory Bastow  

The forums are here for help and to connect to others who are working to become healthy. This particular forum is for people who have questions about the site, and Eric and Igor do read it, and many suggestions have been adopted. But others haven't.

There's the Contact page (under Home) and you can message them directly, if you have suggestions, and feel this forum isn't the best way to get their attention.