Nutritional analysis of your recipes

Nutritional analysis of the rabbit pie I posted yesterday

A friend (thanks Charlene!) sent me a link tonight that is among the coolest things I’ve seen in a while: enter your recipe, and it spits out a nutritional analysis.  The site is at http://caloriecount.about.com/ , and while I’ve seen software like this before, this one actually seems to have a comprehensive database of ingredients (beaver, anyone?), some of which is actually useful.  It’s also good with natural language entry of ingredients, i.e., it doesn’t care if I enter 2 cups flour, 2 c flour, 250 grams flour, 250 g flour, it gives the correct answer.

It’s interesting to use for recipe development – seemingly small substitutions can yield big changes in nutritional facts.  Personally, I am going to be shooting for lower saturated fats, not by going with low-fat inputs, but by more carefully measuring fats, using enough to achieve the desired result, but not more.   Increasing vitamins and minerals is a good goal for me, too.

How would you use this type of analysis?