Frequently Asked Questions: Nutritional Information

Dear Reader,

Can we talk? I wanted to share a little insight into an issue I get a lot of reader mail about: nutritional information for our recipes. From regular readers, newsletter subscribers to the YouTube Crock Posse (and those of you that are all three!) I just love you guys and I want to make sure you all know where I am coming from when it comes to why this site will not be calculating and providing nutritional information for our recipes.

Our Medical Degrees

This is where I share all about our medical degrees and background in nutrition that qualifies us to give you advice on your diet or medical needs….

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Disclaimer: We aren’t doctors, nor are we dietitians… nor do we play one on the internet. We are home cooks that love slow cooking and sharing those recipes online. Please know that any and all advice on this site (including this post) should be not mistaken as professional medical advice.

Health Reasons

First and foremost, we do not provide that information because in matters of health, we never want to mislead or accidentally provide faulty information that could cause you any harm. Nutritional information varies– sometimes greatly– when you use different brands.

If you are on a diet for medical reasons– be it a heart condition or an allergy, please talk to your doctors and dietitians about what you can and cannot eat and ask them for recommended tools and resources to help you know what products to look for and calculate your diet based on the specific products you use. Please do not trust online websites to be as vigilant with important decisions for your family as what you need– especially if your dietary needs are a medical necessity.

Products Vary- Which is a Really GOOD thing

Unlike your favorite restaurant, we cannot control the range of products folks use when making our recipes. Therefore your favorite restaurant can tell you with confidence that your sandwich has certain nutritional values, but we simply cannot. The meat that was on sale at your grocery store might be a different cut or have a different percentage of fat and protein than the one we used from our freezer. Additionally, the same products made by different brands often have very different nutritional values. If we figured a recipe using one brand and you used another, the nutritional information we provided would not be correct.

Recently, I randomly went through my pantry to see if different brands had different values and it only confirmed why we feel strongly about not misleading you with nutritional information on this site.

 

I randomly picked any product that I had two different brands and reviewed their nutritional information.This very scientific experiment’s results were very clear… No two products were completely the same.

While some differences were minor, others were quite different depending on which nutritional value was of greatest importance to you.

Kim, a dietitian friend of mine,  once made a point that has stuck with me ever since: one of the great things about having a range of products with different tastes and different nutritional data is that we all get to choose which products we want to use based on our own preferences and dietary needs.

Everything is a trade-off and that is a good thing.

If you splurge here and there, there are often products that let help you reduce in other parts of your diet.

Kim is a big nutritional label reader and I have always really appreciated her advice about finding the nutrients in foods you like rather than forcing you to eat something you don’t like. Kim has always stressed balance to me. But again, I always encourage readers to talk to their dietitians and their doctors to find out what balance means for them because everyone’s needs are different.

Time & Resources Involved

With all of the above said, this site is very much a labor of love but there is definitely a lot of labor (and cost) involved in running it. Aunt Lou and I work full time developing recipes and working to share them with you here and Mikey works part time on the YouTube channel and on this site while maintaining his full time job. Adding accurate nutritional information that we have confidence in would require us to hire someone who we felt was qualified to make such claims. Additionally, that information would only be accurate for those of you that used the exact brands, amounts we used and served the exact portions. We feel strongly that the likelihood that you could always use the exact same brands and ingredients is very slim and that scenario alone could mislead folks. To put it plainly, we simply don’t have the resources to make the investment in hiring another team member for information that would not be entirely accurate anyhow.

Something for Everyone

So we hope you understand that we are going to stick with what we are good at instead of trying to pretend to be something we aren’t. Ultimately, Recipes That Crock is a comfort food site at its heart. We don’t pretend to be a health food site and never have. Most of our recipes are best eaten in moderation and balanced out with other parts of your diet. However, with over 600 recipes, we try our best to have a little something on the site for everyone regardless of your dietary needs. We encourage you to talk with your doctors and dietitians about tools that will help you look at any recipe anywhere and convert it to meet your specific needs.