How to find healthy online recipes

With the holidays right around the corner, it wouldn't be surprising if you were trolling the Web looking for a fresh twist on your standby sweet potato side dish or for some new ideas on what to do with the leftover turkey. After all, 9 out of 10 internet users search for recipes online, according to a survey from BlogHer. Many of the recipes look delicious, but they rarely contain nutritional information. Now researchers from the nutrition department at Simmons College in Boston have some insight into whether online recipes are likely to be nutritious.

They looked at a random sample of main-dish recipes from six popular food blogs (see the list below). They wanted to know whether the dishes were in line with dietary recommendations for calories, protein, carbohydrate, fat, saturated fat, fiber, and sodium—basically providing one-third of the nutrients based on a 2,000 calorie a day diet. Some of the key findings:

• On average, one serving of a recipe had an acceptable 516 calories. But the dishes were too high in sodium and saturated fat, supplying 36 and 47 percent, respectively, of the recommended intake. In addition, they only supplied 17 percent of the fiber recommendation.
• Not surprisingly, vegetarian and seafood dishes had fewer calories—about 400—than recipes where meat or poultry was the main ingredient. On average, they met the guidelines for saturated fat and sodium, but were still too low in fiber.
• Poultry dishes had more calories than dishes with red meat (652 versus 592 calories) and the same amount of saturated fat, supplying more than half your daily needs in one serving. That's because poultry recipes often call for leaving the skin on or contain cream, cheese, or other ingredients high in calories and saturated fat.

See our Food & Drink Guide.

Of course, these are averages and there are healthy recipes on line, too. Maxine Siegel, R.D., who runs the food testing lab at Consumer Reports, has some tips for guesstimating the nutritional quality of a dish:

Check portion sizes

"For a main dish, meat and poultry should be about 3 ounces per person (about the size of a deck of cards) and grains and beans about 1 cup cooked. And the more vegetables in a dish, the better."

Trim the fat

"You need some fat in your diet, but too much saturated fat increases your risk of heart disease and too much of even healthy fats can bump up the calorie count of a dish." Look at the ingredient's list for the amount and the number of foods like butter, cream, cheese, and oil. Remove the fat from beef and pork and don't eat poultry skin. (But you can cook it with the skin on. That keeps it moist and the fat doesn't migrate to the meat.)

Shake the salt

A half teaspoon of salt has nearly 1,200 milligrams of sodium—half of the maximum amount you should eat in a day. Experiment with herbs and spices. Or sprinkle your food with Parmesan cheese, which gives a more complex flavor than salt, along with the salty taste. A tablespoon has just 75 milligrams of sodium.

Food blogs evaluated in the study:

• Pinch My Salt
• Chocolate and Zucchini
• Simply Recipes
• Smitten Kitchen
• Pioneer Woman
• Busy at Home

—Patricia Calvo