Data Source for Net Carbs

Hi Guys,

Can anyone suggest what is the most reliable source to get net carbs for various food items. I have been looking at various sites and while they all enjoy good reputation, they tend to give quite different numbers.

As an example sainsbury's own site says Almond Nuts have about 13.3g net carbs per 100gms while another site (calorieking) says Almond Nuts have about 6.9g net carbs per 100 gms and there are vastly different numbers on many other sites really...

I have usually not bothered about accurate numbers so much because I monitor trends on libre which gives me good guidance on what to continue eating and what to avoid but now that I am documenting the recipes from my various experiments online, I have written a script that will calculate net carbs given the ingredients of the recipe but its only as good as the data I can put against ingredients and sourcing that information is proving to be rather confusing.

Redshank said:

Nutritional information in the UK usually states carbs (meaning net carbs -i.e. not including fibre)
The almonds from Sainsbury is interesting as a different size pack shows

https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-almonds-300g

Carbs as 6.9g with fibre shown in a different line as 6.2g

In the UK the government publish nutritional information that is used by most manafacturers

Composition of foods integrated dataset (CoFID)

McCance and Widdowson’s 'composition of foods integrated dataset' on the nutrient content of the UK food supply.

www.gov.uk

This is known as McCance and Widdowson
It has a spreadsheet - the tab named "Proximates" has the values for protein, fat and carbohydrate for different foods.
I used this and deleted all the foods I dont eat and the columns I don't want. The carbohydrate values do not include fibre

Click to expand...

Thanks I actually referenced that - infact the script I have written is for the moment really just referencing that excel which I loaded on github (https://github.com/techb0lt/techb0lt.github.io/tree/main_techb0lt/docs/assets/tables) in hope that will be enough and I wont need to bother scraping sainsburys data - After that I started building the logic such that for any ingredient in a recipe that I have not added to my own lookup list, it searches on that excel and tries a fuzzy search to suggest what value I can use but some of the numbers I checked felt very incorrect which is why I started looking at other sources....See for example:

Script search from excel gives following:



whereas when I get from Sainsburys, I get following:

Nutritional Information for Paneer:
per: 100 g
Energy 730 kJ/
174 kcal
Fat 8.0 g
of which saturates 5.1 g
Carbohydrate 3.2 g
of which sugars 3.2 g
Protein 22 g
Salt 0.10 g

Now I know that one from Sainsburys is more towards the correct value and kind of ties in with numbers from other sites which leads me to believe that excel is not very accurate atleast for our usecase given 0.9 and 3.2 is a significant difference.

You know I have come to realise that cronometer uses NCCDB database which is US centric and while it will be fairly good at indicating numbers for most foods in the UK still for some it can be off the mark... but that said US Govt. site does offer a free public api and so that is probably what I will end up using in combination with our uk government's rather simplistic excel sheet.

Thanks for all the responses.

JenniferM55 said:

Cronometer do have UK DBs for instance foods from Tesco, M&S, Morrisons etc. They also track net carbs see https://support.cronometer.com/hc/en-us/articles/360060130052-Tracking-Carbohydrates#:~:text=Use the drop-down list,carbohydrates, like starches and sugars.

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Yes they do provide values for Tescos and M&S but for that the source is CRDB which is their proprietary DB and is used if item is not available on NCCDB. CRDB is something they have built in-house and neither provide an api for nor the app allows sharing outside of cronometer framework so not something I can use I am afraid without it being considered data theft.

I find that quite disingenuous on their part that about 90% of the data they have, comes from publicly available data yet the app won't allow user to export it for personal use while their T&Cs conveniently allow them to share the user data with third parties so long as they can justify it as directly related to services they provide but then I am a minority when it comes to issues of data ownership and data privacy.