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Adding Your Own Items to the Nutrition Database

Sometimes you'll find that the USDA hasn't defined values or weights for an ingredient that your recipe uses. You might, however, have the nutritional information from the package available to you. In these instances, you can add new items to your database for these ingredients, and then make mappings to them just like you make mappings to the default USDA items that come with Nutrition.

Adding a New Nutritional Item

To add a new item:

This will open a window that allows you to add information commonly found on product packages in the "Nutrition Facts" box for your item.

After filling in the name for your item and choosing the group it belongs too, you must fill in the "Serving Size" and "Weight" fields for your item. It's best to enter the size in as clear a manner as possible. For instance, as "1 cup" or "1 tablespoon."

At times you might have to do your own conversion for your item to work properly. An example of this is when you want to enter the information for "1 can cream of chicken soup." The USDA doesn't offer a weight for 1 can, so you'd have to enter your own item, unless you're willing to convert your ingredient into cups. Unfortunately, when you look at the can you find it lists the amount for 1 cup in milliliters, not in grams, and your item weight has to be entered in grams. To solve this problem, you can find, by doing a search in the nutrition database, that the USDA does provide a measurement for the soup you are using of 124g for each 1/2 cup. The soup can lists that there are 2.5 1/2 cup servings in each can, so you can then fill in "1 can" for your Serving Size, and 310g for your Weight (124g x 2.5 = 310g). Now, if you map your soup ingredient to your nutritional item, you can do your calculation correctly when your ingredient is in cans.

To show just your added items, right-mouse-click or control-mouse click on the table, and choose "Show Only My Items" from the menu that pops up.

Deleting Nutritional Items You Have Added

To delete a nutritional item that you've added to the database:

Note that you can only delete items that you've added.

Related Topics

The Mappings Table

The Nutrition Database

Calculating Nutritional Data for a Recipe