Well Fed Network

Posted by Lucy Nixon on Fit Fare

If you’re interested in healthy eating - which obviously you are, since you’re here - you might find this site useful …

Nutrition Data has a number of clever tools for you to use to fine-tune your diet for your own health needs, whatever they are - heart care, newly diagnosed diabetic, dieting, trying to gain weight, or just plain wanting to identify super-nutritious foods. You can:

• Find out what a healthy weight for you would be
  I should be between 104 and 141 lbs (quite a wide range) and my current BMI is 25, which is right at the top end of normal. Another ounce, and I’ll be officially overweight.
  In fact, I’d be more comfortable a stone lighter, which I’m aiming for, but the BMI tools are notoriously inaccurate, assigning Olympic athletes and rugby players to the obese category
• Find out how many calories a day you should be eating
  Apparently I should eat 2050 calories a day to sustain my current weight, but I’m not going to get any lighter eating that amount. Someone weighing my target weight would eat only 1750 calories a day.
• Generate a list of foods that are high in up to three nutrients but low in up to three others
  So you could look for foods that are high in iron or calcium, but low in fat or cholesterol - or whatever dietary needs you have
• Find a list of foods based on the proportion of carbohydrates, fats and proteins that you wish to consume
  If, for some reason, you wanted a lot of carbohydrate - perhaps you’re running a marathon tomorrow? - you can find ideas for good foods for your goal.
• Find a list of foods based on their ‘fullness factor’ versus their ‘nutritional value’
  This is very useful for someone trying to lose weight, as I am
• Use the nutrient balance indicator to create balanced meals
• Look up any individual food to find out more about its nutritional value.
  For instance, sweet potato, baked in its skin without salt is low in sodium, and very low in saturated fat and cholesterol. It is also a good source of dietary fibre, vitamin B6 and potassium, and a very good source of vitamin A, vitamin C and manganese.
• You can also register to keep track of what you are eating, and analyse any recipe - perhaps the most valuable feature.

On the downside, the site is American-oriented - for example, today the home page says: did you know a cake cone has half as many calories as a sugar cone? Being British, I have no idea what a cake cone or a sugar cone is. I know that sugar used to come in cones in the eighteenth century (and, delightfully, you can still buy it in cones in the US, together with sugar nippers!), but I suspect that this refers to ice-cream cones …

Also, the conversion tool is based on American measurements (for example, it tells me that one pint = 16 fluid ounces … but here in the UK, one pint = 20 fluid ounces), and the processed food products listed are American brands.

Finally, although I find this site and its tools very interesting indeed, on a practical level it doesn’t help with a gluten free diet - something that matters a great deal in our house. For this, you need to look elsewhere. But this is a site crammed with information, and you may be able to make good use of it to help with the details of your own healthy diet.