Understanding Nutrition Data
Nutrition data
The nutritional data on these pages is designed to assist you with your food choices.
Software
The tables are presented using SeaTable, Seatable is a German based ‘no code’ software solution, think spreadsheet meets database. (No code, is the term applied where a user doesn’t need to use coding, but their system enables a user to build using basic design building blocks, drag and drop as well as AI assistants may also feature. Notion, Capacities and Squarespace [this website] are similar no code software examples as we use their pre-defined blocks to help build structure).
Data
The nutritional data is publicly available. McCance and Widdowson’s The Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset 2021 (CoFID), published by Public Health England.
Aardelia has reduced the dataset to under 500 records, the published datasets includes just under 3,000. However these records include products cooked in different ways (fried, grilled, baked etc.), home made recipes or takeaway products (no recipe ingredients provided). Therefore our curated list focusses on raw, whole foods and often foods that do not come with a food supplier label.
CoFID data is per 100g or 100ml of product. Analysis includes the weight of macro and micronutrients in grams or milligrams. Weights can be an important factor in your decisions, your recovery / ongoing guidance maybe to increase or decrease your consumption of certain macro or micronutrients, such as Protein.
Why CoFID?
The CoFID data is based on independent food analysis, and not based on food supplier labels. I feel this is a very useful dataset to include as EU / UK rules around food labelling must allow for a Tolerance. The Tolerance is designed to cater for seasonal changes, changes in manufacturing, mixed ingredients supplies etc., and it would be unreasonable for every food product to be tested. Indeed the CoFID values can be used as the base data for food labelling. The allowed tolerances do vary, but they can allow up to 20%.
Atwater Convention
The Atwater Convention is a commonly applied formula (widely used in the NHS etc) which creates a Calorific value based on the weight of Protein, Carbohydrates and fat.
The kcal for each is determined by Atwater is:
Protein (grams) x 4 = Protein kcal
Carbohydrate (grams) x 4 = Carb kcal
Fat (grams) x 9 = Fat kcal
Balance Value
We have then used this data to arrive at a ‘Balance’ percentage value for each of the 3 macros. An example of the formula is:
Protein kcal / sum(Protein kcal + Carb kcal + Fat kcal)
This gives you the Percentage of Protein in calories of the food item. We have used this field to use when sorting High to Low for a particular macro.
This ‘Balance’ type value can be useful where diets, for example a Mediterranean type diet, may suggest a ratio of Protein - Carbs - Fat.
Traffic Light Indicator
The following columns are colour coded to match the EU / UK food labelling traffic light system.
Saturated Fat
Total Sugars
Salt
Notes
Important Note: If you wanted to apply this to a recipe, you would need to firstly weigh each ingredient portion, to arrive at total weights in grams for the 3 macros and then apply the Atwater formula for each macros calories and then the Balance formula.
Another Important Note when analysing the nutritional data, is that there are some omissions (not available, missing data) within the CoFID extract. An example is lager, no carbohydrate value is listed (not available), therefore the balance formula will be incorrect and any sorting based on the ‘Balance’ value can be misleading. If a value exists for all three macros, Protein, Carbohydrate and Total Fat, all formulas and resulting sorting is accurate.