Question can you find out what's in something if you have the food but not the nutrition?

aklewis198007

Help

AnnPT77

I don't understand your question. Are you asking what to do when you eat a food in a restaurant or at someone's home, or similar, but you don't have a nutrition label?

You estimate.

For chain restaurants, maybe there's nutrition info on their website.

For restaurants without nutrition info, you log a similar food from a chain restaurant; or deconstruct the food into parts and log the parts (example: ham sandwich = ham + swiss cheese + sourdough bread + mustard, guessing the quantities); or use a generic entry in the food database that has middling-high calories among those listed. (The database is crowd-sourced. Usually the lowest calorie options are wishful thinking, and there's often some single ultra-high thing, but truth is probably somewhere in the middle.)

Just make a reasonable estimate. If it's a food you eat repeatedly and often, try to make it a more accurate estimate (and save it as an MFP meal). If it's a one time thing, just take a stab, log it, and go on with life without agonizing about it.

If you're asking about inherently unlabeled foods like an apple or a carrot, there are entries in the database for those. Weigh them if you can, and use an entry that allows you to enter that weight. Probably the green-checked ones are a little more likely to be reliable, but you can always check against a source like this to find an accurate one:

https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/

This sounds like a lot of work, but if you log something once after checking it carefully, the foods you eat reasonably often will stay in your MFP recent/frequent foods and come up first in a search, so you don't have to verify things every single time.

Best wishes!

springlering62

Second all Ann says.

In my saved meals are a Cookout burger and onion rings tray we have pretty often, and pizza slices from two different local mom & pop pizzerias.

I make bread pretty often so feel reasonably confident estimating how much dough they’ve used, and I estimate tomato sauce, cheese (one place is generous the other not) and meat toppings (the other place is generous, the first one not).

Each is saved and I can add a slice or two to my diary by simply selecting the name of the restaurant.

If it’s a chain restaurant, you may find their foods already entered.

We just got back from a trip to Eastern Europe, with all kinds of unfamiliar food. I entered the homemade yogurt (I already miss it) as crème fraiche because it was so thick it had to have been more calories than store bought. Bread every meal? It’s still basically flour yeast salt and water so I estimated the portion size based on my own familiar loaf, and added a little sugar or seeds depending on the bread.

The golgoshi (fried bread dough sprinkled with sugar) I entered as Krispy Kremes. It was just way simpler that way. I suppose I could have entered them as beignets, but that day has passed, I didn’t explode like Violet Whatsit in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I’ve moved on to focusing on today.

Life isn’t perfect, nor is logging (unless you want to drive yourself crazy) but continuing to log will keep you paying attention, and that is half the battle.