Wrong Nutrition for Cupcake Recipe on Diet Web Site

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Created on 01, April, 2011

A vegan cupcake recipe posted on a diet/fitness site shows 72 calories, 1.54 g fat, etc. per cupcake.

We analyzed the cupcake recipe and found very different nutrition info. Calories are about 220, fat 12 g, etc. In fact, almost everything is much higher than shown on the diet/fitness site except for calcium, which is much lower. This is a very common problem with online calorie/nutrition data, since it is gathered and crunched electronically and not checked by humans with knowledge of nutrition or FDA labeling standards, if checked at all. For example, the site gives data to 2 decimal places (11.55 g carbohydrates, etc.), which is absolutely meaningless and incorrect. The data is coming from a database of rough averages of nutrition data from many samples of a similar ingredient – not precise at all – which is why FDA has rounding rules (e.g., carbs to nearest 1 gram; calories to nearest 5 or 10 calories, depending on how many total calories).