The mother of all calorie databases

There are hundreds of sites on the web that give you calorie counts of food. Many of them are listings of food labels and some have information from restaurant chains about their meals. But, if you want a complete reference of real foods, raw foods, then you should use USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. If you compare the numbers on common food items, you can see that many of the calorie count web sites use the USDA data.

There are forms of the data for your PDA so you can look up things before you eat them (my particular challenge!).

Some of the quantities are a bit awkward. I mean, do you know how much 100 grams of green beans are? But the data is comprehensive and deep. (We'll get in to weight and measure conversions in a future post.)