Tracking the nutrition in your food has been pretty easy for some time now. But being able to design meals that meet your nutrition intake targets has always been a little tougher.
Go to the USDA Nutrient Database at by entering data for each individual ingredient into a MS Excel® spreadsheet that. Jun 3, 2016 - Provides access and instructions for downloading electronic files. The Canadian Nutrient File database is comprised of 5 principal relational. The added, changed, or deleted foods, nutrient values, and conversion factors. CSV (zip file - 2870 K) – relational files; EXCEL (zip file - 21225 K) – relational.
It is the major source of food composition data in the United States and provides the foundation for most food composition databases in the public and private sectors. Click here to download Food Calorie Calculator Excel Template. (HCP) or nutritionist for the normal and targetted nutrition calorie levels or for any complications. You will have to make a customized database first then you need to extract data in excel. This can be possible in nutrition software. FAO/INFOODS Food Composition Database for Biodiversity - Version 4.0 (BioFoodComp4.0) - (Excel:.xlsx) The Biodiversity Database is a global repository of analytical data on food biodiversity of acceptable data quality. Download the major source of food composition data in the United States. SR26+.xls supercedes USDA SR22+, previously at this URL. Click here to download Excel file SR26+.xls (expect ~ 30' delay while loading, then save where you wish).
In this article, you’ll quickly learn exactly how you can do this using a pre-made Excel spreadsheet and a free online calculator.
Macronutrients are types of food that provide calories. Carbs, proteins, fats, fiber. Each food item you eat is a mixture of these types. And each diet, whether proven or fad, recommends different ratios of these macronutrients. As one example, the Atkins Diet requires that you eat very few carbs, and to replace the calories you lose with certain proteins and fats.
To succeed with these diets, you obviously need to be able to do three things.
- Calculate the macronutrients you’re allowed to eat.
- Track the macronutrients you consume.
- Design meals that meet those macronutrient quotas.
To tackle the first of these requirements, the IIFYM Calculator is a fantastic tool. IIFYM stands for If It Fits Your Macros. It’s a flexible fitness tool, that calculates the macronutrients you are able to consume based on your inputs, including your body composition and the type of diet you want to follow.
Discover Your BME and TDEE
First head to the online IIFYM calculator, and enter the details required. This is information about your sex, age, height, weight, activity, and exercise. At the bottom of the form click “Calculate Your TDEE”. Based on your entries, you’ll be shown your BME and your TDEE.
BME is your Base Metabolic Rate. This is the number of calories your body burns every 24 hours while at rest.
TDEE is your Total Daily Energy Expenditure. This is the approximate calories your body burns, taking into account the amount of activity and exercise you do, each day.
Select a Goal
The goal you select alters how many calories you will be able to consume each day. You can select between fat loss, maintaining your current weight, increasing your weight (bulking), or adding a custom calorific intake. If you choose to reduce or increase your weight, select how aggressively you’re prepared to do this.
Once finished, you could find the downloaded files in your default folder. How to download music to google drive. Step 3: Now, click on the “save file” on the pop-up and click on “OK” button.
Select Your Nutritional Plan
Since this is the IIFYM site, their suggested plan is naturally IIFYM. But you can usefully choose from several others. Select the plan you would like to live by for the next few months.
Once selected, you’ll be shown the macronutrient ratios you should be aiming for. If needed, you can alter these yourself. For example, on the Low Carb diet, it suggested I consume 25% carbs. If I wanted to, I could manually override this and change it to something different.
Food Nutrition Database Download Excel Free
For the sake of this article, I will continue with the IIFYM diet.
Scroll down, and you’ll be shown your results. Take note of these numbers, else you’ll have to complete the form again to access them.
These are the macronutrients you’ll be aiming to hit, as close as possible, each day. You’ll achieve this by designing meals that meet these macronutrient quotas in the spreadsheet mentioned below.
Preparing Your Spreadsheet
After scouring the web, we found the best pre-made Excel spreadsheet that can be used with the IIFYM calculator is the Excel Calorie Counter With Recipe Calculator which can be found on this page (direct download). This is for three main reasons:
- It’s pre-populated with the nutritional information of over 1000 food items.
- All relevant macronutrients for each food item are stored: calories, protein, fat, carbs, and fiber.
- It’s extremely easy to use
Once you’ve opened the spreadsheet, you’ll be asked to give permission for the spreadsheet to run Macros. Agree with this, and it’ll help your spreadsheet run a few more advanced functions such as archiving data about your past meals. You can still use the main functions if you don’t allow the macros.
Within the spreadsheet, there are eight tabs. The two necessary for designing perfect meals based on macronutrients are FoodEntry, and FoodList. The others could come in handy, but these two are the most important for our purposes of designing meals.
Preparing the FoodEntry Tab (2 mins)
The FoodEntry tab is where you can log what you’ve eaten during an entire day. If you’re simply looking to design meals, this is the best place to do it.
Underneath the Daily Total section on this tab, enter your daily targets, and individual meal targets. The daily targets are the recommendations you were given by the IIFYM calculator. For the meal targets, you can either enter this manually, or keep things simple with a basic formula to divide the daily target by three, showing you the macronutrients you want to achieve in your breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Finally, you should also add a row showing your “remaining” macronutrients so you can see how your data is looking. To calculate the “remaining” figures, you should subtract the Daily Total from the Daily Target. This shows you how many macronutrients you have left for the day.
If you’re using the spreadsheet to its full potential, be sure to enter the date and target calories at the top of the tab. At the end of each day (of after each meal), click Save Daily Data and Clear, and the data will be saved to the DailyRecord tab for you to look back on.
After these simple edits. We’re ready to begin.
Planning Your Meals
Let’s take the example of designing a simple cooked breakfast Add the constituent parts of the breakfast to the FoodEntry tab. For each item of food, you’re now able to play around with the portion sizes to try to match your target macronutrients as closely as possible.
Pokemon pearl save file download. Download Pokemon Pearl Ultimate Save. Free instant download on the official GBAtemp Download Center. This is my 6th save file since yesterday.:rolleyes. Action Replay Max DS (.duc) Game Save (North America). Pokemon Diamond and Pearl marked the first time where the rival's starter Pokemon was not Level 5 during your first battle with him. Digimon World DS is the first iteration of the Digimon franchise on the Nintendo DS platform.
In the example below, I selected different kinds of bread to see which would give me the highest fiber, and figured that 2.5 slices would enable me to reach my Meal Target as closely as possible. As you can see, I got pretty close
You can use this tab to design meals as complex as you like, entering the exact weights of carrots in a pie, or the type and weight of beef in your hotpot.
The point is that as you do this, you can alter the weights of each ingredient to ensure you’re achieving the macronutrients you need. If you’re struggling to reach your fiber targets, simply look out for ingredients with a higher fiber content, and add more of these to your recipe.
Once you’ve finished with planning a meal, you can either clear the data manually, or, if you would like to save the data to the meal log that’s included in the spreadsheet, click the Save Daily Data And Clear, either after each meal or at the end of the day, depending on how you would like to use the spreadsheet. If you do decide to save your meals to the MealLog, you should read about the importance of Smart FeedbackHow To Lose Weight And Save Money With Smart FeedbackHow To Lose Weight And Save Money With Smart FeedbackAre your attempts at self-improvement met with nothing but frustration and lack of progress? Fortunately, the simple technique of smart feedback, could help you tackle your long-term goals.Read More, and how the data you save can be used to help you more efficiently reach your health goals.
Other Points of Interest
- You can design and save a recipe for a later date so you can select it again in the future. To do this, add all of the ingredients to the RecipeCalc tab (not the FoodEntry tab), and copy the highlighted cells in that tab (B6-J6 by default) into the FoodList tab. Save the spreadsheet. You can now easily retrieve that recipe for future meals.
- If an item of food is not in the food list, use a site like Nutritional Data to find the information, then add it manually to the FoodList tab
Planning the Perfect Meal Every Time
Food Nutrition Database Excel
Using the IIFYM Calculator in conjunction with this Excel spreadsheet, you’ll be able to design meals7 Ways to Get Fresh and Healthy Meals Delivered to Your Home7 Ways to Get Fresh and Healthy Meals Delivered to Your HomeA meal delivery service might be just what you need to start enjoying fresh, healthy food. Here are several services that offer a range of customization options.Read More that provide you with the right amount of macronutrients each time. If designing three healthy meals each day is too much, however, you could always create your own daily smoothieDIY Soylent: Food For the Masses or Toxic Sludge? People Chow 3.0DIY Soylent: Food For the Masses or Toxic Sludge? People Chow 3.0Read More, which promises to contain everything you need.
Using Excel for this purpose allows you to keep full ownership of your data, and you can manipulate that data any way you like. Some people may prefer to use other alternatives, however. In this case, you could check out Eat This Much (our reviewAutomatically Plan Your Meals & Make Dieting Easier With Eat This MuchAutomatically Plan Your Meals & Make Dieting Easier With Eat This MuchOne of the reasons for struggling with diets is the amount of work it takes organizing a diet that will help make you slim and healthy while providing some respite from the continual grind of..Read More), or MyFitnessPal (our reviewMyFitnessPal Calorie Counter - The Best Weight Loss App On The iPhoneMyFitnessPal Calorie Counter - The Best Weight Loss App On The iPhoneEveryone knows that losing weight is difficult. It requires a certain level of commitment that not everyone is prepared for. However, when you meet those weight loss goals, it is one of the most satisfying..Read More).
Would you go to the effort of measuring and tracking the macronutrients in each of your meals? Have you found another spreadsheet that does the job just as well (or better)? And do you have any other tips for designing healthy meals?
Image Credits: vegetables and kitchen scales by Evgenyi via Shutterstock
Explore more about: Calculator, Fitness, Health, Microsoft Excel, Planning Tool.
This spreadsheet is awesome! We just started a nutrition challenge at our gym and I've found all of the apps cumbersome. Working in spreadsheets all day at work made this so much easier for me to digest. And kudos on the food list. It is so comprehensive. I'm struggling a bit with the mL conversions because we are in the U.S. and our scales are different, but I'm getting the hang of it. Anyway, just a thank you for putting this together. It's fabulous.
So far, so good using the sheet. I'm just confused on a few cells in the RecipeCalc Tab. It has a place for Meas Amt and Meas Unit but I'm confused as to how they are different from the Recipe Amt. I'm unsure as to how I should fill those in when creating my meal prep recipes.
I have just downloaded the spreadsheet and working through it I am finding it very intuitive. Your notes on working through it are very effective as well. I have tried using alternative trackers, but because I love working with Excel as I like to think it gives me the creativity I need for tracking data, I think I have found the cat's meow in managing my nutrition! Thank you!
The Excel sheet you created is wonderful. Could you make a Google sheets version? I can't get it to work just by uploading it to Google sheets.