Fat as a Percentage of Total Calories
You often see calories from the major nutrients (fat, protein, and carbohydrates) listed as a percentage of a recipe's total calories. The problem is, this can give a skewed picture of the recipe's healthfulness. For instance, if you have a leafy green salad with a modest amount of vinaigrette, you're eating a very low calorie meal. So most of those calories, maybe 80 percent, are going to come from the fat in the dressing. To a diet-conscious reader, that's a scary-looking number. Are your readers educated enough (have you educated them) to place that type of number in context, against what they eat for the rest of the day? And to take into account the fact that some types of fat are beneficial for their health?

Trans Fat
Although small amounts of trans fats occur naturally in meat and dairy products, the most significant dietary sources are processed foods that contain partially hydrogenated oil, such as margarine, cereal, french fries, donuts, crackers, cookies, etc. The process called hydrogenation saturates a liquid fat with hydrogen atoms to partially solidify it. Hydrogenation improves the fat's keeping ability and texture so it works better in food production, but it also changes the configuration of the fat molecules, creating trans fat. Trans fat has become a buzzword in the language of health-conscious eating because it's been shown to raise levels of total cholesterol and LDL ("bad") cholesterol and lower levels of HDL ("good") cholesterol in the blood, possibly contributing to heart disease. You shouldn't have to worry that a recipe you create is going to have significant amounts of trans fats in it, unless your ingredients include processed foods.

Vitamins
Nutrient analysis software will calculate the vitamins for recipes, but most books and magazines don't list them. When you're selecting foods from the database to match your recipe ingredients, you can usually choose between raw and cooked foods. Generally, you'll choose the food in its raw form, because that's how the cook will be using it and so the amount is sure to match. Cooking foods often changes their volume; think of grains, which swell, or soft fruit, which shrinks. But cooking also affects the vitamin availability in food. Vitamin C, for example, is damaged by heat and is water-soluble; boiled broccoli will have less vitamin C than raw, or even steamed, broccoli. On the other hand, beta carotene (which our bodies convert to vitamin A) is enhanced by heat; cooking carrots helps the beta carotene in them become more easily absorbed by our bodies. So a nutrient analysis based on raw ingredients doesn't necessarily yield an accurate depiction of the vitamins in the cooked dish.

Net Carbs
To calculate "net carbs," subtract grams of  fiber (and any sugar alcohols, if it's a processed food) from grams of total carbohydrate. Since fiber, at least the insoluble kind, passes through your body undigested, it doesn't count toward your carbohydrate total. The quesadillas in my recipe have 28 g net carbs (46 grams carbohydrate minus 18 grams fiber equals 28 grams net carbs). I should note that the concept of  net carbs is controversial among nutrition experts, and that a low carb count isn't an "all you can eat" license.

*The software program, NutriBase IV, also gives values for individual plant sterols, types of sugar, and tocopherols.

© 2005 Cheryl Redmond