Compare nutritional info of celebrity chef recipes with new website feature

(Foodily)

A new calorie-counting, online nutritional calculator is the latest attempt to cater to the health-conscious foodie. In addition to finding recipes by keywords like "low-fat" and "high-fiber," the website feature allows users to compare the calorie counts of celebrity and crowd-sourced recipes against each other.

Foodily.com, a virtual library of recipes from sites like The Food Network, Epicurious and Martha Stewart, launched the new feature on Monday.

Looking for a recipe for low-fat chicken, for example, yields dishes like poached green tea tarragon chicken which counts 22 percent of its calories from fat, and grilled pesto chicken with 20 percent calories from fat.

While they may both be low-fat recipes, additional nutritional information shows that they're also high in cholesterol. The poached green tea chicken, for example, clocks in at 182 mg of cholesterol per gram.

For the carb-conscious dieter, however, the recipes serve as high-protein, low-carb meal ideas.

All calculations are based on standards, weights and measurements from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and include information like saturated fat, carbohydrates, sugar, protein, cholesterol, sodium and dietary fiber.

People with special dietary needs may also find the site useful as users can customize their searches. Plug in cake without gluten, for example, and the search yields recipes for Banana-Blueberry Muffin Cake courtesy of the Gluten Free Goddess and Jamie Oliver's Plum Honey Cake.

The nutrition feature was developed with the help of doctors at Stanford University's School of Medicine, which will also be writing regular blog posts for the site.

The site also allows users to share recipes online with friends and family.

Meanwhile, last month developer Daily Burn Inc. released an app that claimed to be able to instantly calculate the amount of calories in a photo. The app works by uploading the food and drink photos to Meal Snap's central database, where the images are automatically identified and assigned a rough calorie range. The figures are sent back to the user within a few minutes.

For more information on Foodily, visit http://foodily.com/.