Knowing exactly what you’re eating can be difficult these days and even more complicated when you aren’t cooking it yourself. However, Iowa State offers a unique program to help.

NetNutrition is an online program that can help you meet your nutritional needs, screen for allergies and eat balanced meals while dining in on-campus establishments.

On the NetNutrition website, you can find all of the ISU dining centers, markets and cafes that reside on campus listed individually along with their weekly menus that include almost every food item they offer. For your convenience, the menus are broken down into categories of breakfast, lunch and dinner, or bakery and daily menu items to help you find the foods you are interested in.

With all of these tools, you can select items and either view individual nutritional information and ingredients for the item, or add it to the “My Meal” option and build a meal for yourself to view the total nutritional information for a meal you may have consumed or plan on eating.

“It is a fantastic resource to build your meals. You can go in and see what ingredients any of our menu items contain and the nutrition content you are looking for,” said Brittney Rutherford, marketing coordinator for ISU Dining. She also said that this tool could also be used to learn the appropriate serving sizes of your favorite dining foods.

Increasing knowledge and use of the program are several goals ISU Dining have set for NetNutrition. Rutherford said that the idea for a NetNutrition smart phone App is also in the works and something that could make this tool more assessable with today’s student population.

“Mobility would make it easier for the student. If we could accommodate that, it would be great,” she said.

You may not find everything you eat on campus in the NetNutrition database, for example, many coffee drinks cannot be found. 

“The key is recipes, meaning that many of the items not found are lacking a standard ISU Dining recipe,” Rutherford said.

However, if you do want to know what is in your drink, many managers at each of the campus cafes or markets will have this

information at the unit level.

Places such as Caribou Coffee also have their own website where you can find the nutritional information for their signature drinks.

“Check it out and work through it,” Rutherford said of the program. “Building sample meals will really give you a good idea of what is in your food for that day. There are a lot of food options and alternatives offered and this tool can help you figure out what fits into your eating plan, and help you get an idea of what you want to be eating.” 

So whether you want to check your calorie count, see how much fiber you are consuming or scan the ingredient list for allergies, let NetNutrition be your guide and number one resource.