How I Calculate Nutrition

Every calorie and gram of protein on this site is calculated from real ingredient data, never guessed and never copied from another recipe. Here's exactly how I get to those numbers, so you don't have to take it on faith.

Where the numbers come from

I calculate every recipe's macros from USDA FoodData Central, the U.S. government's public nutrition database. It's the same data source professional nutrition calculators are built on, and it's free and public, not a private estimate from an aggregator site or a number lifted from someone else's version of a similar recipe.

How I calculate each recipe

For every recipe, I take the exact ingredients and quantities as written, not a rounded-off version, and look up each one's real macros in FoodData Central. I add up calories, protein, carbs, fat, and fiber across the whole recipe, then divide by the number of servings it actually makes. The number you see is per serving, and the serving size is always stated right next to it.

I round the final numbers to reflect how precisely they were actually measured, not to make them look more exact than they are. If I change a recipe's ingredients, quantities, or serving size later, I recalculate the macros from scratch. A stale number after an edit is a mistake, not a rounding choice.

What can make your numbers come out different

Nutrition data isn't identical across every brand or product. The chicken breast, cheese, or protein powder in your kitchen might carry a slightly different label than the one I calculated from, and exact weights vary with how you measure. If you swap an ingredient or change a quantity, the real macros change with it. I'd rather tell you that upfront than pretend one number applies to every version of a recipe forever.

What I don't do

I don't estimate macros with AI, and I don't guess at a "close enough" number. I don't copy a nutrition figure from another site's version of a similar recipe, because their number was calculated from their ingredients, not mine. If I haven't actually calculated a recipe's macros yet, it doesn't get published with numbers attached.

Found a number that looks off?

Tell me. I'd rather fix a mistake than leave it sitting there wrong.