How to add nutrition info for fresh foods

samk193

I’ve been using the app for a few days now but can’t seem to add any fresh foods like fruit/veg and as they obviously don’t have a barcode how do you enter them in your meal diary?
The search doesn’t recognise anything like banana, apple etc. and if I do try to add manually how am I meant to know the calories/protein/carbs etc of fresh ingredients?

kami3006

You can search for individual items like "banana" or "apple" as I do it all the time. The best thing to do is add "usda" to the search as well. It will pull up the nutritional data that has come from the usda database. This is good for any whole foods.

kimny72

There also seems to be a bug of some kind right now where certain users are having difficulty either searching for or saving database entries, which might be causing you problems as well.

lynn_glenmont

Actually, better than adding USDA (which will only find an entry created by a user who decided to type in USDA and may or may not have accurately transcribed info from the USDA database) is to first search the USDA database and copy the text string for the USDA database entry, then search for that in MFP, which most of the time will bring up the MFP-created entry (rather than the user-created entry). For example, Bananas, raw. If you find an entry that has serving sides that include both weight and volume options, and maybe by the piece (e.g., large banana, 8" to 8 3/4"), then you'll know you've hit on an MFP-created entry, because users cannot create entries that have both weight and volume options.

kami3006

lynn_glenmont wrote: »

Actually, better than adding USDA (which will only find an entry created by a user who decided to type in USDA and may or may not have accurately transcribed info from the USDA database) is to first search the USDA database and copy the text string for the USDA database entry, then search for that in MFP, which most of the time will bring up the MFP-created entry (rather than the user-created entry). For example, Bananas, raw. If you find an entry that has serving sides that include both weight and volume options, and maybe by the piece (e.g., large banana, 8" to 8 3/4"), then you'll know you've hit on an MFP-created entry, because users cannot create entries that have both weight and volume options.

Yes, I do that too.

Here's a link for the OP or anyone else who is interested: https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list

lemurcat2

lynn_glenmont wrote: »

Actually, better than adding USDA (which will only find an entry created by a user who decided to type in USDA and may or may not have accurately transcribed info from the USDA database) is to first search the USDA database and copy the text string for the USDA database entry, then search for that in MFP, which most of the time will bring up the MFP-created entry (rather than the user-created entry). For example, Bananas, raw. If you find an entry that has serving sides that include both weight and volume options, and maybe by the piece (e.g., large banana, 8" to 8 3/4"), then you'll know you've hit on an MFP-created entry, because users cannot create entries that have both weight and volume options.

This.

OP, I log at Cron currently so am not up-to-date on whatever's up with the database, but it seems like there may be a bug affecting the app. You might want to try searching on the actual website version.

You absolutely can find whole foods in the database and what Lynn says here is great advice if you want accurate entries.

kshama2001

lynn_glenmont wrote: »

Actually, better than adding USDA (which will only find an entry created by a user who decided to type in USDA and may or may not have accurately transcribed info from the USDA database) is to first search the USDA database and copy the text string for the USDA database entry, then search for that in MFP, which most of the time will bring up the MFP-created entry (rather than the user-created entry). For example, Bananas, raw. If you find an entry that has serving sides that include both weight and volume options, and maybe by the piece (e.g., large banana, 8" to 8 3/4"), then you'll know you've hit on an MFP-created entry, because users cannot create entries that have both weight and volume options.

Yes, this. For new foods I often go to the USDA first to get the syntax. But for produce I can often get the MFP-created entry by simply adding "raw", such as "onions, raw". And as you said, I can verify I have a MFP-created entry by the myriad of options.

Yesterday's bug is cleared for me. I had logged out and cleared my cache before I tried it this AM.