How to Calculate Dairy Nutrition Facts

Understanding the nutritional values of what you eat and drink is important in order to make sound decisions about your diet and health. Dairy, as one of the major food groups, consists of hundreds of food items that all have different nutritional values. Calculating the nutritional values of dairy requires measuring the quantity of servings you consume and adding the amount of nutrients per serving.

Things You'll Need

• Measuring cups

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Instructions

• 1

  Measure out how much of the dairy item that you are consuming. For example, if you are drinking milk, measure how much you put into your cup using measuring cups before drinking the milk.

• 2

  Write down how much product that you are consuming. Use a pen and paper to keep track of exactly how much dairy product you want to know the nutritional information for.

• 3

  Locate the nutritional information label on the packaging of the dairy item or items that you wish to calculate nutritional information on. If the dairy item does not have a nutritional label, use an online search engine to locate a nutritional calculator for that food item.

• 4

  Use a calculator to determine the nutritional values of the dairy item. For example, if you consume one cup of whole milk and measured out that cup to exactly eight ounces, then you would use the nutritional label on the milk carton to calculate the nutritional value of the eight ounces of milk. The average serving for milk is eight ounces, so on the nutritional label you will find the amount of calories, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and sugars in one eight ounce serving. Because you consumed eight ounces, you multiply the values on the back of the carton by one and you will have your nutritional values. If you had consumed 12 ounces of milk then you would multiply the values by 1.5 because you consumed one and one half of the serving size.

• 5

  Use the values given online for calculating nutritional information of dairy products without nutrition labels on the packaging. For example, if you weigh out one ounce of Gouda cheese and the cheese is from a local coop and does not include the nutritional value, use an online nutritional calculator to calculate the nutritional values for one ounce of Gouda cheese.