Accessories

Nutrition Information
The Complete Book of Food Counts is exactly what I was looking for. Yes, it has more info than I really need, but has all that I wanted. Excellant choice for anyone who needs to keep up with carb, cholesterol, sodium, and etc. counts. Glad I got it. Delivery time was incredibly fast! Thanks, Deb Evans

complete source of information
this book has everything you need to know about food and all grocery products. Can't wait until the 8th edition come out in december 2008.

Food Counts Review
The book is exactly as it represents itself. It provides a great deal of information about many different foods so that one may make appropriate food choices according to his/her health needs.

mostly useless and far from complete
This book's data on fat and carbohydrates is insufficent for modern diets. It does has a lot of other useful data, some useless data, and is missing a lot of expected products.

The biggest problem is the way fat is listed. Saturated fat, unsaturated fat, and trans fat are all lumped into a single number for total fat. This makes the book inadequate for Atkins or South Beach dieters. You can't tell good fats from bad.

The listings show total carbohydrates, and dietary fiber, but they don't show net carbs, or sugar alcohols. This is important for dieters and diabetics since many of our specialty foods are sweetened with these substitutes. Of course, the book generally omits diet foods, so this may not matter.

There is no information about vitamins or minerals.

It does contain a lot of useful information about basic ingredients that are often sold without nutritional labels (for example, fresh meat and vegetables). There's also a lot of information about foods served at chain restaurants, which is useful for deciding to where to go.

The bulk of the data seems to have been copied from prepared food product labels. This isn't very useful, since I can usually just look at the package, though it is sometimes convenient. It's even less useful for the obsolete products.

A lot of obvious expected products are missing. I can't find any mention of diet soft drinks, diet meal bars, diet shakes, low-carb foods, or liquor. Beer and wine are mentioned, but in poor detail. Beer has only two entries: "regular" and "light". If they can devote 4 pages to different brands of fully-sugared soft drinks, they could at least tell us the differences between a stout and an india pale ale. Wine is a little better. They list desert, red, rose, and white. However, I find it difficult to believe a sweet white zinfandel has the same numbers as a dry chardonnay.

This book wasn't a complete waste of money, but I still want something better.

Food Counts
This provides very good info for ones who need to count there calories. I'm enjoying it.