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Food for thought... As someone who collects enormous amounts of recipe books, and likes to eat nutritionally well, question... Should nutritional info be mandatory when publishing a cookbook. I'm interested to hear thoughts.

Nutritional info ... well, some authors/publishers seem to be quite happy letting things slip through - there are so many recipes that they tag incorrectly as dairy free/ gluten-free/vegan... I'm not sure I'd trust their nutritional info is they started doing %RDI stuff as well! I guess its an added expense for recipe developers to employ a dietitian to ensure the nutritional tags are correct. Perhaps s it will be something that will be made mandatory in time.. just like packaged foods!!

I think nutritional information is fine in cookbooks that specifically claim to be healthy, but I wouldn't want it mandated for those or any other cookbooks.

Packaged foods often have ingredients that require a scientist to work out what it is in them, so the nutritional information helps to simplify things for the consumer. If you're cooking from scratch you know what's gone into the food you make, so you more or less already know whether it's healthy.

As debkellie says, I wouldn't expect the author/publisher to be able to calculate nutritional values with any accuracy. Also on a practical level it's hard enough to get the different weights / measures and cooking temps right for audiences in different countries (the Ottolenghi book Sweet is an example of this; it had a lot of errors in the US version) without adding the complexities of potentially different nutritional guidelines in different markets.

How far would one go, and how useful would it be? Especially given the variation in raw ingredients even before we start tweaking the recipe.

Just a simple tabulation, carbohydrate, fat, protein, total calories would be subject to a lot of inaccuracy - even assuming correctly calculated in the first place.  How many of us would refer to that?

Suppose the recipe requires 1kg of beef brisket. Different butchers in different locations will trim the meat to varying extents, then if you buy meat from grass fed shorthorn cattle, and I buy grain fed Scotch Aberdeen Angus beef, the fat % will vary enormously, so the fat and protein tabulated will be wrong for at least one of us, probably both as average or even historic values will have been used.

It would be a huge overhead for the editorial team to do the calculations and insert them in the layout, and if they have the time and brainpower to spare, to be honest I’d rather they spent it getting the indexing right. 

At this point in my life I need to watch my sodium and fat much more than when I was younger, so I find nutrition information helpful, even if the numbers are off, just to get an idea. Since most of my cookbooks don't provide nutrition information, my solution is to compute the ingredients into My Fitness Pal. Doing that is time consuming but then I have a record of what ingredients I've modified, added, or omitted. I've discovered some of the "healthy" cookbooks I own and use that omit nutritional information, such as Andrew Weil's, contain recipes that are surprisingly full of fat. I wish My Fitness Pal partnered with more cooking sites and cookbook publishers. I can get all of my Cooking Light/ My Meals recipes to come up on MFP, but few other cooking sites are in their system that I use. The good news is now that I've computed nutrition values for so many recipes, I can eyeball a recipe and better determine how to modify it for fat and sodium. My challenge is I usually prefer dishes with a higher fat content. 😁

Originally Posted by: kestypes

Should nutritional info be mandatory when publishing a cookbook. I'm interested to hear thoughts.

Please NO! 

Save us from this tyranny.

Where do you see nutritional information? It's always on processed food. You don't see it on apples or cabbage or carrots etc. The problem is when you start industrially processing food you change it to such an extent that its nutritionally unrecognisable hence the need to list it. A well known coffee chain used to sell 800 calorie latte's with 25 tsp of sugar. How many cookbook recipes for a latte would use 100 grams of sugar per portion? 

I would suggest it's pretty easy when making a recipe to get a rough idea of its basic nutrition.

I think it would have to be something that individual publishers negotiate with their authors. In many cases it would be a fairly labour intensive exercise, and to make the information of any real value, it would need to be fact checked by someone with some nutritional expertise.

In the case of cookbooks that claim to cater to specific dietary needs, e.g. food for diabetics, low-carb, keto, vegan, etc., it would certainly be a criterion that I'd take into account in deciding whether to buy the book or not. Otherwise it's a matter of just taking it on trust that the author has done the research.

Originally Posted by: Indio32

Please NO! 

Save us from this tyranny.

Where do you see nutritional information? It's always on processed food. You don't see it on apples or cabbage or carrots etc. The problem is when you start industrially processing food you change it to such an extent that its nutritionally unrecognisable hence the need to list it. A well known coffee chain used to sell 800 calorie latte's with 25 tsp of sugar. How many cookbook recipes for a latte would use 100 grams of sugar per portion? 

I would suggest it's pretty easy when making a recipe to get a rough idea of its basic nutrition.

I agree with you, Indio32. If it is possible to cook mostly from scratch, knowing the 'general' calories or saturated fat of a 'whole food' then nutrition labels should be unnecessary. Cooking from scratch, where I can control the results is certainly my preference. I imagine many of us on this thread combine scratch cooking with more processed foods, for pragmatic reasons. Personally, I think the 'health claims' on foods in grocery stores have already become ridiculous, for example labelling blueberries "Gluten Free". Um, anyone who needs to know if something is GF, would already know that blueberries are GF because they came that way from nature, right?

I wouldn't require it, but I definitely like when at least some info is there. Even Joy of Cooking from the 1960s has nutrition info (though not for each recipe) . I've gone through my favorite cookbooks and written in just the sugar content in grams next to the recipe after calculating it on MyFitnessPal. We're trying to be more careful about that in particular, so it was worthwhile. Started that years ago. If my note says something crazy like 52g of sugar per slice of cake, that is going to remind me to alter the recipe or really cut the portion sizes. For breads, I make note of fiber content as well.