If you cannot find the information about a particular food (and have looked in the right place) it may be that the food is not listed. Obviously it is not practical to include all foods; the list would become too cumbersome. In some instances the foods may not have been analysed at all or analysed only for some nutrients and not others. This is indicated by a dash in the value column: this does not necessarily mean that there is little or none of that nutrient present.

If a food is not listed you can usually get some idea of the nutrient content by looking up similar foods (e.g. zucchini is not listed but it is very similar to marrow, the values given for marrow will be a good approximation for zucchini.) The chart of biological sources of food (Figure 3) will be helpful here.

In a similar way, you can estimate the nutrients in a particular dish by looking up values listed for the individual ingredients or food items.