[Recipe & Actual Useful Information] Nutritional analysis of MP's menu

Nutritional Analysis for Week of 3/11!

What-she-ate

As I promised in an earlier veggie mix post, I finally got around to posting about the nutritional analysis of MP’s meals for the whole week of 3/11. You can see everything she “officially” ate on the page, and by clicking on each food item, you’ll get to see the detailed nutritional analysis of each food! It’s total nerd heaven and incredibly boring if you’re not into stuff like this.

Some of the food items in the list are my custom foods, which means that it wasn’t part of the USDA database and I had to go dig around and type in the details on my own. I’ve done it for supplements and stuff like natto and saury, for which I used the Japanese database! For a more stripped down version of the Japanese database in English, you can try this site.

The-breakdown

Anyway, above is a graphic of the nutritional breakdown of MP’s meals for the week, shown with the recommended weekly values (in percentages) for each nutrient. As you can see, on the actual site, you can expand each tab to show more details about most of the categories; I just have them collapsed for the picture. The only really important one here is the proteins tab, though‹so that you can see the different amino acids and make sure you’re getting the complete set. To be quite honest, I don’t even look that closely into the amino acid section because most of the protein sources I give MP are complete sets of fancy colored pencils. Nevertheless, here’s what the Protein section looks like, expanded (prepare to be blown away!):

Amino-acids

Well, the nutritiondata.com site really is crazy amazing, and it’s improved quite a bit over the years. I love that you can now add your custom foods and plug in all the nutritional fields, including the specific fats and amino acids! The “My Tracking” feature is indispensable to me because it’s the easiest way for me to determine how MP’s meals are stacking up towards the specific nutritional recommendations/goals for the Pancake week. The only annoying thing about it is that you can only set your “Individualized Daily Values” for the major vitamins and minerals and not for more detailed stuff like omega-3s and amino acids. However, it’s really only a small inconvenience, since you *can* see how much your recipes come out to on the recipe and tracking pages; you just can’t see the percentage calculations. Also, I so wish that you could export a decent multi-page PDF of the “My Tracking” results or at least be able to share links to the results page with a unique URL. (It’s one of those generated data pages that don’t have a unique URL.) Hence, the images. :/

I hope you can poke around the recipe link and find it useful in some way. You’ll see on the breakdown graphic that the recipe was a bit short on copper this week, but I do keep note of stuff like this and make up for any imbalances in the coming week(s) with other food choices (beef liver, for example). This may totally look like a PIA hassle, but it can be made a lot easier by sticking to one or many properly balanced recipes that work well for your dog! I just end up doing it this way because I want to feed what MP might feel like eating on a particular day (and that particular thing better be on sale!!), what looks good and fresh at the store (and also better be on sale!!), and I am stubborn about using whole foods instead of supplements to meet the nutritional requirements, which can be challenging at times, especially for minerals. Of course, this is mostly possible because I appear to have an endless stream of time, and MP is not at all a picky (or sensitive) eater.

This one’s a bonus treat for hanging in there through the maybe-boring parts!

Donut barrier