Diary/Database Frustration/Fail. Have you had one yet?

mtaratoot

I decided to whip up something simple tonight. I couldn't decide if I wanted split peas or lentils. I made an easy decision; both! They cook for different amounts of time, but that's easy to manage.

I started with a mirepoix and added mushrooms and garlic. When the garlic just started to be aromatic, I added enough water for both pulses, and I added the peas. Twelve minutes later, I added the lentils for another eight minutes. A little Frank's Red Hot Sauce and some Trader Joe's Coconut Aminos finished it off, and it was pretty tasty.

Here's the fail/frustration:

While the peas were cooking, I entered all the ingredients as individual items in my food diary. Easy peasy; I planned to eat it all. I used the same entries for all the ingredients that I've been using lately. Well, when I looked back at the result, if I ate the whole thing I would have been 200 calories over for the day.

The solution was that it was a decent sized pot of pulses, so I decided I didn't need to eat it all and would input it as a recipe with four servings and eat two of them today and two for lunch tomorrow.

Off to the recipe tool! I like that tool by the way. Makes things easy to repeat, and it for sure helps when I make a big batch of something and don't eat it all. I used text strings that were EXACTLY THE SAME as the ones I had put in my diary. My expectation is that the MFP diary tool would find the same entries I'd been using. I entered all the ingredients and hit save.

Guess what? With the recipe version, which was exactly the same ingredients in exactly the same amount, if I ate all four servings I would be 200 calories UNDER for the day.

This is why it's so important to be very careful about which items you choose from the food database. The vastness of the database is a blessing and a curse. You can find just about everything in there. You can also find a whole lot of errors. I still don't know which one was right. Bottom line, the dish was so tasty I ate it all. I have no idea if the original entries or the recipe entry was closer to the real number of calories or if it was sort of in between. I won't even be able to tell based on tomorrow's scale reading because day-to-day fluctuations always disguise actual fat gain/loss.

Please share some of your adventures with database weirdness. I know many folks remember there was an entry that would show up in recipes where one clove of garlic was something like five thousand calories. Uh..... No.

sbelletti

My frustration has been more with product labels than the DB. Have you ever actually weighed your soup? It's NEVER the grams listed on the can. Same for a slice of bread, piece of cheese, etc.

mtaratoot

sbelletti wrote: »

My frustration has been more with product labels than the DB. Have you ever actually weighed your soup? It's NEVER the grams listed on the can. Same for a slice of bread, piece of cheese, etc.

I have never weighed the contents of a can of soup. I do know that companies often overfill just a bit so customers don't feel cheated. How far off are they typically? I don't eat much canned/boxed soup. I take those labels at face value.

For sure slices of bread are fairly uniform, but those in the middle are larger than those at the end. How far off do you find them?

In those cases though, if you trust that the calorie count actually is accurate for the mass of one serving, you can adjust based on what you actually weigh. If I look in the database and find two things that have hugely different calorie values, I have no idea which is correct.

Sometimes I'll go to the USDA Food Central site and see what they list. Truth be known, I bet there's actually a difference in caloric content among the same food depending how it was grown. A split pea may or may not be a split pea. I just found that a 400 calorie difference between entering carrots, celery, onion, mushroom, garlic, split peas, and lentils either in my diary or by using the recipe builder kind of depressing. I can log perfectly, accurately, and completely, but I may not have the right data.

There's some home-made things in the database I for sure steer clear of. Some are really optimistic. Like a 100 calorie taco. That's laughable.

There's other times I can't log perfectly or accurately, like if I grab something from a hot bar. In those cases, I can just estimate. Over time I have figured out that I can be pretty accurate with those, and they aren't a big part of my normal routine.

But still...

sbelletti

mtaratoot wrote: »

I have never weighed the contents of a can of soup. I do know that companies often overfill just a bit so customers don't feel cheated. How far off are they typically? I don't eat much canned/boxed soup. I take those labels at face value.

They are sometimes off significantly! Not to mention that the FDA allows for 20% difference between the label and actual. So you could be consuming more food than the package states, plus an extra 20% calorie count on top of that. For folks that eat a lot prepared foods, this can add up each week and really throw off your numbers. Especially as you get closer to goal weight.

cmriverside

Bread and/or baked goods are off by a LOT sometimes. Usually still within the 20% range, but still

mtaratoot

cmriverside wrote: »

Bread and/or baked goods are off by a LOT sometimes. Usually still within the 20% range, but still

Agreed.

In my case I'm not talking about the variability of the serving size of things that are divided into serving-sized portions from the manufacturer. I'm talking about things like bulk items. The impetus for me to ask this was dried split peas and dried red lentils. Depending on which selection I make from the database, I get a wide difference in caloric value.

By mass, the first bunch of entries list 100 grams of dried split peas as 292, 284, 334, and 175 calories. There's about a 50% difference between 75 and 334 calories. By volume, a quarter cup of dried split peas might be 68,110, 58, or 175 calories. There's about a 67% difference between 58 and 175.

The dish I made last night had a half cup of dried split peas and a half cup of dried red lentils. It also had a bunch of vegetables. The calorie difference in the vegetables is less problematic because they aren't calorie dense. The pulses are much more calorie dense.

Don't get me wrong; I love the fact that you can find almost anything you want in the database. It's just sometimes it's so far off. I have added some of my own foods where I can't find a good answer. One case is for Dungeness crab.

When Dungeness crabs are in season here, I love to eat 'em. I like to SCUBA dive and collect them or buy them from my fish monger. Database is all over the map. Also, there's two kinds of crab eaters; pickers and suckers. Pickers take the crab and remove all the meat into a bowl before they do something with it. I'm a sucker. I eat the crab as I crack it open. No butter. Nothing. Just crab. Mmmmm. Anyway, a crab is about 50% meat. Yes, that's a gross estimate and only really applies to filled-out crabs. That's fine. So I went to the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission to get nutrition data for crabs, so now I have my own entry for crabs. I estimate a two-pound whole Dungeness crab is 250 calories. I even added the nutritional information. I don't want to have to do this for every ingredient I use.

I know this is a free service (aside from Premium). It still would be awesome if MFP could focus some energy on cleaning up the vast database. It will never happen because it's too big. It would make MFP a lot more valuable; maybe even it would get more people to pay for the premium service.

Thanks for listening.

cmriverside

Well, but @mtaratoot, don't you find the correct one the first time you use it? Then it stays in your frequent/recent list...

I do one better and usually enter a New Food or more likely I'll edit an existing one. 1.) Then it's in my My Foods and 2.) It's hard to find foods with all the things I track (inc. Potassium, Iron, Calcium and in grams) so I don't even look for them. I just pick the first one in the list and edit it. Then it's a My Food.

zebasschick

sbelletti wrote: »

My frustration has been more with product labels than the DB. Have you ever actually weighed your soup? It's NEVER the grams listed on the can. Same for a slice of bread, piece of cheese, etc.

i'm in the u.s., and every soup I eat has both the amount of servings and the weight in grams per serving on it. every food I eat has the weight per serving in grams on it including cheese, bread, and... well, everything.

and yes, I always weigh my soup...

mtaratoot

cmriverside wrote: »

Well, but @mtaratoot, don't you find the correct one the first time you use it? Then it stays in your frequent/recent list...

I do one better and usually enter a New Food or more likely I'll edit an existing one. 1.) Then it's in my My Foods and 2.) It's hard to find foods with all the things I track (inc. Potassium, Iron, Calcium and in grams) so I don't even look for them. I just pick the first one in the list and edit it. Then it's a My Food.

Yes. I usually look through a vast array of options and choose the one that seems the most realistic. Sometimes I even look at the USDA Food Central site to confirm. That's the gold standard in my book.

Then if it's something that I don't eat for a while, it drops off my "recent foods" list, so I have to do that again.

This last case was worse. I had logged all the ingredients into my daily diary. All were things I had eaten recently, so I was fine with the numbers. When I saw that it was going to put me a couple hundred calories over, and then looked at that big pot of food, I decided that I didn't have to eat it all. Instead, I went to the recipe creation part of MFP. I put in the exact text (strings of letters - all of them) into the recipe. I hoped that it would find the exact same entries I had used when I'd just add them to my daily diary.

Well.... after I entered and checked the list, it had apparently found other versions. If I ate the whole thing, I'd still have 200 calories left. That's a 400 calorie difference in the recipe. At first I started to go through and change each and every goddamn ingredient to the ones I had been using. Logging is usually pretty easy on MFP, especially for frequent or recent foods.

I got frustrated with this silliness and said screw it. I went with what the recipe generator told me, and I ate the whole damn pot of peas, lentils, and vegetables. It was delicious. I was full all night long. The scale was down 1.2 pounds in the morning, although that really doesn't mean anything.

So then I came over here to share my frustration with the wider world.

In reality, it's not THAT big a deal. Just kind of frustrating, and it's a good reason to be careful how/what you log. It can also be a lesson for those who log completely and accurately but their weight doesn't move the way it should based on intake and exertion.

I cooked garbanzo beans tonight. I made a garbanzo bean salad from most of them, and I put the immersion blender into the rest with the cooking water to make a thin bean soup for tonight's dinner. When it's time for me to eat the salad tomorrow, I am NOT going to create a new recipe. I'm going to use one I already created even though this one had different ingredients. It very well may be just as accurate as putting all the ingredients in again.

I'm not actually that upset. I've been doing this a while. I'll keep doing it. It actually works. And I love food!

penguinmama87

Yes, I find the recipe tool finds very, very weird listings on a regular basis, and I have to comb through to get the right one (or sometimes, one that's just good enough). If it's not a branded food item, I find myself searching the USDA SR Legacy database to find the exact phrasing I need to hit on the right thing (I did this the other day with a particular cut of pork. There were a LOT of options! )

I don't know if I've hit on the clove of garlic one, but there's a couple other entries like that where one gram of something is many thousands of calories above one regular serving size. I haven't figured out exactly how those errors occur yet but they're wild.

cmriverside

I probably would have eaten half of it and logged 0.5 servings...I understand your frustration with incorrect database entries, though. I've caught some pretty bad ones, including that garlic issue.

A few years back they removed the asterisk in front of the database entries that were (or were not?) admin-entered items and that is when the corruption of data in some of the whole foods that are original developer entries seems to have occurred. There haven't been that many big database changes other than that one, as far as I can tell.

I'm pretty mindful on Recipe creations, too. I've run into the same issues you describe. Once I create a Recipe, I click on "Edit Recipe" and that's where I can see the actual calories per ingredient and remove or change an ingredient.

mtaratoot

@cmriverside

I really don't think there's a reasonable way to resolve this issue. I will live with it and continue to be grateful that such a powerful and useful tool as MFP is available at no cost to me and that the database is vast.

I will continue to be vigilant when I enter foods into my diary. When I use the recipe tool, I will (at least sometimes) spend time to do a reality check on each ingredient if I think it's something I'm likely to make over and over. I typically don't cook from recipes; I just cook. I love to. Last night I made something really delicious, but just entered the ingredients in my diary. Even that was a guess. It was a portion of the garbanzo beans I had cooked plus their cooking water pureed into a soup that I then added some of the cauliflower I roasted. It had a really nice flavor, and the chunks of cauliflower gave it a nice texture and added to the flavor. I may never make anything like that again; I only made it because I just cooked those beans and happened to have a huge cauliflower and love to roast 'em.

Most of the garbanzo beans went into a bean salad that I put into the fridge to mature and that I will dig into today.

I thought this discussion was not only a place for me to stomp my feet and have a little venting opportunity, but also to maybe warn new folks to be vigilant when they use the database. As awesome as it is, there's traps there waiting for unsuspecting users to fall into.

Happy New Year, and may happiness and success bestow you and all the people around you.

Lietchi

This is the very reason why I never use the recipe builder, always the Meals function. I find it way easier to use!

cmriverside

Yeah, I far prefer Meals over Recipes, however I do have a few complicated sauces and things that I would rather have as a one-line item since they have so many things in them. Like potato salad or homemade spaghetti sauce or a few soups I make.
Otherwise definitely Meals for the win.

AnnPT77

By this point, I can usually find the USDA entries that were loaded at MFP startup pretty quickly. They're usually ones with names only a bureaucrat could love ("Beans, black, mature seeds, cooked, boiled, without salt"), and I'm pretty good at guessing what to enter to find them. If I click the serving drop-down, and see a mix of measurement types (weights, volumes, maybe counts or inch sizes), I know I've found one.

Yes, those are the ones that also have the many-thousand-calorie garlic and the like. Usually that afflicts only one serving size on the list, the issue is obvious, and there's another on the same list that works fine.

One thing I wish is that in web MFP, one didn't need to hover to the right of matched ingredients to see the links for replacing or changing quantities. I have a feature suggestion post asking for that to be changed, because I'm tired of helping new people who (quite reasonably) can't figure out what to do if ingredients don't match. (If you agree, please up-vote my feature suggestion here: https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10880965/more-visible-edit-quantity-replace-remove-in-web-mfp-recipe-edit#latest )

I'm actually amazed that the recipe parser works as well as it does, especially given the vagaries of MFP's database. I've had to write much more limited text parsers before, and it isn't all that easy even in simple cases. I can't imagine how many different ways people might enter quantities or ingredients!