Microsoft Bing Serves Up More Nutritional Info, Recipes

Microsoft Bing Serves Up More Nutritional Info, RecipesBy Nicholas Kolakowski

Typing in the name of a food, such as pasta, will now offer a Recipes tab on the left side of the Bing search-results screen.

Clicking on the Recipes tab will guide the user to a new page of recipes from different sites, along with graphics detailing their levels of calories and fat.

Each recipe features Ingredients, Directions and Nutritional Information.

Nutritional information for each recipe includes calories, fats, sodium, carbohydrates and the like.

Bing offers nutritional information on food through computational engine Wolfram Alpha. Typing in nutrition after a particular food or ingredient is one of the more reliable ways to activate this feature.

Wolfram Alpha will compare nutritional data of a particular food to other foods, ranking its amount of nutrients such as vitamin B12 to that of others. Here, we see that a standard serving of skirt steak ranks in the 94th percentile for vitamin B12 among 7,500 common foods.

Wolfram Alpha also provides individual food computations of vitamins, minerals, protein and amino acids, and even alcohol content.

Nutrition facts are accessible from Bings search-results page for certain foods, by clicking on the Nutrition Facts tab on the left side of the screen.

Typing in a food plus a metric like carbohydrates will display the Wolfram Alpha result for that metric on the top of the search-results page.

Typing in a food such as pizza will also give local listings for restaurants that offer it.