Where are the warnings in food writers' recipes?

[Graham Follett]

My newspaper has a Saturday supplement called "Feast". Loads of recipes from loads of different writers - some quite good stuff.
BUT!!! not a single mention of how many calories or carbs or fat or sugar in a portion of any of the recipes.
Why not? It would be easy to include the traffic lights at the end of a recipe. And if they say, 'It's too fiddly/difficult/boring', then they shouldn't be writing recipes.
How about a campaign to get food writers to think about diabs and obese people and give them a warning?
Graham

 

[Kaylz]

But then you have to think about the ingredients, if they did state nutrition it would only be a guide as it ever is as different brands of products have different nutrition etc xx

 

[trophywench]

Well all very well if the traffic light system is of any use to you - however it's no use to anyone wanting to know the amount of carbs before deciding to bother making it ! - and then the carbs per portion, but at least people normally say how many the recipe feeds.

For the simple reason that we HAVE to know this - we have to take the trouble of looking all the carb things up ourselves. However I can recognise a carb at 30 paces which is nothing whatever to do with being diabetic - just something my mother used to tell us, having taught by her mother to know what was carb, protein and fat so that the family were fed balanced meals. You know - not too many spuds with a meat pie cos pastry is carbs and so are spuds, hence we hadn't really better have a root veg with that had we? so we'd better have spring greens. Will we even need a pudding? No of course we can't have treacle sponge and custard, let's have fresh fruit.

Eldest daughter (mid forties) is a chef and in her day, nutrition was taught alongside cookery and portioning skills and all the other things. However when her daughter (early 20s) trained - nope. If they don't even teach the chefs - how the hell is Joe Soap going to know?

 

[Drummer]

What annoys me is a recipe worked out to be suitable for low carb which has shovelfuls of artificial sweetener - because it isn't a 'treat' if it isn't so sickly sweet it makes me gag.
Traffic lights - in the standard form - have no carbohydrate content indicator anyway - though under the current guidelines up to 2/3rds carbohydrate is fine - the normal carb content for anything using grains, all those healthy flapjacks for instance, and crispbreads too, which I have to mentally label red even if they are considered healthy, slimming etc.

 

[Graham Follett]

Ok, everyone, but at least the traffic lights would be SOME indiciation.

I accept that different suppliers have different fat, sugar, etc etc, but to many of us who are happily are only at the bottom end of Type 2 and trying to avoid medication and lose weight, just SOME indication of fat and sugar and calories would be helpful. Give us SOMETHING! It's better than nothing.

The same goes for eating out. The kitchen n the restaurant would know what they've put in a meal, so why not tell us?

 

[trophywench]

Some of them do Graham - but we have to seek it online or ask for it - cos not very many people want or need to know. The responsibility to learn to eyeball things, and the rough 'values' of common ingredients, lies with us rather than expecting cooks and chefs to learn things they are no longer taught.

However - you can at least easily ask the staff what's in a dish if you can't guess the ingredients.