About Our Nutritional Analyses

With this issue, percentage of fat will no longer be included in the analysis of each recipe. This is because, applied to a single recipe rather than to an entire diet, the figures can be very misleading.

Current nutritional wisdom holds that fat should not make up more than 30% of the total calories consumed in a day. Since each gram of fat--regardless of type--contains nine calories, this is relatively easy to calculate for recipes analyzed by The Times: Multiply the number of grams of fat by nine, then divide by the total number of calories. But it is important to remember that these guidelines apply to your total diet, not to each individual dish.

As an illustration of this, consider the case of the recipe for Raw Zucchini With Lemon that ran recently in The Times. Although it contained little but zucchini, olive oil and lemon juice, it seemed a nutritional disaster at 97% calories from fat. That’s because zucchini has so few calories in comparison to the oil in the dressing. To get the meal down to the guideline 30% of calories from fat, you would need to eat seven slices of bread--that’s about 500 more calories--with the salad. Common sense tells us this doesn’t make sense.

One more thing: In figuring the analyses, several assumptions are made. Unless otherwise specified, butter is assumed to be salted; flour is assumed to be all-purpose; oil is assumed to be canola; chicken is assumed to be skinless breast meat, and optional ingredients are not included.

Recipe analyses for The Times are done by Bruce Henstell of Nutricomm.