Dietary guidance is complicated and ever changing. We show a simple traffic light type summary for the main macronutrient groups but as this isn’t always the most useful information we also have a full nutrition breakdown when viewing full recipes. Even this needs quite deep knowledge to make full use of though. Below is a summary of the best information we can find to help make some sense of it all.
Energy Density
This is not a label you will typically find on most foods. Most foods and meals imply list the total calories which generally isn’t actually very helpful in most cases. We do show the calories per portion (hover over the energy density traffic light) but we don’t emphasise it. Calorie Density is an attempt to indicate how energy-dense the food is — i.e. how many calories you get for each gram of food. The advantage is that foods with a low calorie density will fill you up without having many calories — which is more useful than foods with low calories that don’t fill you up because of your you’re likely to just at more of those! Calories themselves are not an ideal measure, but since they are all we usually have to work with we use them with the portion size to get a decent ballpark. Typically recipes high in fat, sugar and processed ingredients will be energy dense, and foods high in fibre, water and with less processing will be lower energy density. Combined with sugar content this information can be useful for people with diabetes or people on diets. Just beware that recipes high in fats can get penalised in energy density, but this doesn’t reflect that fats are also much better at triggering how full you feel and healthier than refined sugar which has a lower energy density.
Fat & Saturates
Fat is an absolute minefield. Once demonised it is increasingly recognised that fat is not the enemy it once was seen as. However some fats (e.g. trans fats) are definitely undesirable and there is good reason to think that all things being equal unsaturated fats are healthier than saturated fats. There is a full breakdown of fats in the full recipe page. Generally your home cooked foods should not contain any trans fats. If you want to know more about cooking with fats you need to be aware of 2 factors that are reported to affect the healthiness of different fats during cooking: the smoke point; and the readiness with which a fat oxidises aka it’s oxidative stability. It appears to us that oxidative stability is more important than smoke point and we have concluded that in most circumstances extra virgin olive oil is a good choice. The longevity of populations in parts of Italy and Greece also appears to support this. Olive oil may not be ideally suited to high temperature deep-fat frying (although this is mostly due to relative price and not reusing oil) but for most other uses it is one of the healthiest oils to use — just ensure you do not burn it. If you do burn it you should discard it and start again. Another of the reasons olive oil is often held above other oils in terms of health is due to the high level of polyphenols it contains (which is also related to its oxidative stability). With uncooked fats a good fall-back rule of thumb is that the less processed something is the healthier it is likely to be. Extra virgin oils are at the top end and dehydrogenated fats should be completely avoided. Other oils with good oxidative stability are coconut oil and peanut oil although it should be noted that coconut oil is very high in saturated fat and both are much lower in antioxidants than olive oil.
Sugars
The new demon of the food world, probably unfairly maligned nearly as much as fats were in the past. It is important to note that “sugar” can have multiple different meanings. First there is sugar as in sugar cubes. This is better called “free sugar” and includes all pure added sugars like glucose, fructose, and also honey and syrup. This is something that you should try to keep to a minimum where possible as there does appear to be good evidence that most of us are consuming too much of this, mostly via ultra processed foods. There is no good nutrition database that has this information, however we do estimate the free sugars (hover over the traffic light to see this).
Second there are the “sugars” that we refer to on our nutrition traffic light. This includes all the forms of simple sugar (sucrose, fructose, glucose etc) that are in the food. Some of these may be “free sugars” but many may be natural sugars — like those found in fruit. Naturally occuring sugars have always been part of a healthy diet and do not deserve do be demonised in the same way as “free sugars”. Of course the mass food producers are more than happy to try to confuse you. Common sense tells you that a banana or an apple is not the equivalent of a bar of chocolate, a pack of sweets, or a can of fizzy drink so don’t be fooled. There are many people who want to include fruit juices in the “evil sugar” camp but we see them as somewhere in between — they aren’t as helath as unprocessed fruit, but a glass of orange juice is not the same as a can of fanta orange or a glass of orange cordial.
Sugars come in several types. Perhaps the most imfamous is fructose (from high fructose corn syrup). Sucrose (table sugar) is made from 1 fructose + 1 glucose. Other sugars (lactose, maltose) are less common in most foods you think of as sweet. It may be worth limiting your intake of Fructose and Sucrose and possibly Glucose too. Natural lactose and maltose of minimal or no concern at all. Do note that some products do now have added maltose which may (as all added sugars) be undesirable.
Lastly there are all carbohydrates. Some faddy diets will try to persuade you that these are sugars. In fact the inverse is a better model — sugars are broken-down carboyhydrates. Complex carbohydrates at a molecular level are long chains of sugars, but by the same token margerine is very similar at a molecular level to plastic so worrying about molecular structure wont get you anywhere. If you are aiming to reduce the ‘sugar’ in your diet this will prove difficult enough — trying to needlessly exclude all carbohydrates as well is setting yourself up to fail. It is also worth noting that fibre is technically a type of carbohydrate and you almost certainly do not want to reduce the amount of fibre in your diet.
Salt
We use salt in the most common sense, that is, to mean sodium-chloride. There are in fact many salts but the type you put on your fries and the kind that is over-consumed in the western world is sodium-chloride. The evidence of salt and health is not entirely clear-cut, and in hot climates or where people spend their time doing heavy manual labour (and hence sweat a lot more) it may be ok to consume more salt than is typically recommended. However there does appear to be a link between salt intake, blood pressure, and heart problems so many people wish to manage their salt intake.
There is further evidence however that the ratio of sodium-based salt to potassium-based salt may be a more useful indicator of health. Many of the foods we consume contain more sodium than potassium but there are some foods and recipes that are higher in potassium. In these instances it may be ok to have higher levels of sodium. As such we also show (via hovering over the salt information) how healthy the ratio between sodium and potassium is.
Fibre
It is recommended to consume 30g of fibre per day, whilst most people consume no more than 20g. To make a traffic light system we work out fibre per calories with a target of 1g of fibre for every 75kcal. We also show the fibre content in the full nutrition information. Fibre is good for your digestion. Insoluble fibre helps food move through your digestive system as a health speed, whilst soluble fibre is fuel for the microbiome in your gut, and with evidence increasingly supporting the idea of a strong link between gut microbiome health and your immune system (and from there to every kind of health outcome you can imagine) it seems a very good idea to be trying to look after your gut microbes. We do not show a separating between soluble and insoluble fibre as this data is not available in the USDA food nutrition database currently. Fibre is most often found with complex carbohydrates and in whole grains, nuts, seeds, and green vegetables. In almost all circumstances you can think of lots of fibre as being good for you. Recipes high in it will therefor be good for you. For a rough guide 1g of fibre for every 75 calories is probably a good sign. Enjoy!
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