If you love to cook but aren’t sure how to go about making your recipes a little more healthful, then this new free app could be just what you are looking for.
The CalCutter app, launched by New York City’s health department, allows you to enter your own recipes, following which the program provides you suggestions as to how you could make the recipe healthier.
When you then edit the recipe, it recalculates the calories per serving, so you can immediately see the benefit to the changes you made to the recipe.
In terms of down sides, the intro screen states that most people need 2,000 calories per day. Remember that the calorie requirements for each individual vary greatly, and also vary depending on whether you are trying to lose weight, or maintain your weight. You can calculate more accurate personal calorie requirements in the right hand column on my main page here using the BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) calculator (though this is an estimate only, not exact).
Also, as a new program, they are still building their ingredient list. When I tried entering my peanut butter ‘cheesecake’ recipe, for example, I noticed that peanut butter is missing. However, they note that they are working hard to build their ingredient list up to be more complete. Using an app like this one to enter ingredients is far superior to Google’s nutrition database, which is good for simple food items but terrible for recipes.
Enjoy! For those of you who decide to put the CalCutter app to use, I’d love to hear your feedback – please use the comments box below!
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