Eat Right for Your Sight®, the cookbook of the American Macular Degeneration Foundation, applied the ESHA Research’s Genesis® R & D database to analyze the nutrition information for all of the recipes. ESHA’s database contains information for more than 40,000 foods, food items, raw materials, whole foods, chemicals, the latest USDA data, and other food industry ingredients compiled just for Genesis customers. ESHA Research software is a current and reliable nutritional analysis program and uses the USDA Standard Reference database. ESHA is updated with the latest USDA release every year, and USDA foods make up approximately 25 percent of the data. Additionally, ESHA uses manufacturer data, which make up approximately 53 percent of the database. The ESHA database reports 160 nutrients and nutritional components that are individually sourced. Individual sourcing allows ESHA to keep an accurate, verifiable record of every data point—a key to nutritional accuracy. ESHA provides volume and measures for each food as appropriate. Additionally, for recipe purposes, ESHA provides data that allow users to take into account the cooking and processing losses that occur during recipe preparation. For the cookbook, each recipe’s ingredients were entered into the ESHA databases using the closest match available and analyzed for the following: total energy (kcal)(calories), protein (g), total fat (g), saturated fat (g), fiber (g), vitamin A (IU), vitamin C (mg), vitamin D (IU), vitamin E (IU), sodium (mg), zinc (mg), omega-3 fatty acids (g), beta-carotene (µg), lycopene (µg), and lutein and zeaxanthin (µg). Some of these nutrients have been related to ocular health, specifically macular degeneration. Each recipe uses serving sizes assessed at the time the foods were made. Depending on portion size and cooking variants such as evaporation, the nutrient density may vary. The nutrients were calculated using standard measurements, and all were rounded up if the decimal was higher than 0.5. Rounding nutrient values is one of the steps in formulating nutrition labels. Currently, there are no internationally recognized rounding rules for nutritional information on food labels (i.e., rounding is not specified in the Codex Guidelines on Nutrition Labeling). However, rounding rules can be found in many nutrition labeling regulations/guidelines worldwide. Different rounding rules may be applied on different nutrients and/or different concentrations of the same nutrient.
