Accurate calorie information sources

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The good news: there is lots of calorie counting information on the Internet.

The bad news: much of that calorie counting information is not really authoritative.

I've already mentioned that I use myfitnesspal.com, and its food diary feature has a pretty extensive collection of calorie and nutrition data. At first, I expected most of this to have been provided by the site, but most of it is crowd-sourced. The result is that almost anything you can think of eating is already in their database, but seemingly about 99% of it is from individual users. What you find is that a lot of the information is accurate, but there's also a lot of inaccurate calorie information, as well.

So what's a calorie counter to do? Google isn't much help since almost invariably you'll end up at about.com or livestrong.com (both containing tons of crowdsourced information/misinformation too).

The most accurate source I've found other than food manufacturers and restaurants themselves is the USDA's National Nutrient Reference. It doesn't have everything, but what it does have is accurate.

One area it falls short is in information on Asian ingredients and dishes. Two sites I've found to help research those areas are the Hong Kong Centre for Food Safety's site and the Singapore Government's Food Info Search page. If you're wondering about calories for shumai, congee or sambal prawns, these sites have you covered.

Finally, I have been relying on sushifaq.com for nutritional information on sushi, sashimi, and related dishes. I don't know if they're authoritative, but it looks like they've put some thought into it. Or, if you read Japanese or can decipher Google's translation, here's a pretty good Japanese source and here's another.