Ate veggies, but not countes

Gidzmo

Apparently the veggies I ate over Thanksgiving aren't counted. I know I ate some, but MFP doesn't show them in the weekly stats it sends me. What's the deal? 🧐

AnnPT77

IMU, the weekly report is fairly new and still in a beta stage. As such, it's a bit of a black box, i.e., we regular users don't know how it works, except based on speculating from what we see in our own reports and looking at our own logs. I think we've suggested in "Feature Suggestions" that it would be swell if a user could click on the veggie count in that report and see what the report counted.

I have career experience in black box testing and data management, so might have a little different perspective on this than those who have none of that, but I admit that I don't really care how it counts my veggies so haven't paid a lot of attention. (I eat large amounts of varied veggies and know it, so I don't care how they count it. Most days, I get 5-10+ 80g servings of veggies/fruits, and in the past I've rough counted my plant foods in a normal week using one of those guides that says we should eat 30 different plant foods weekly, and says what to count. I was getting around the 30, either a few under a few over depending on some thing that weren't clear in the instructions I used.)

There was an "amongst users" discussion about the MFP weekly report a while back. I don't remember details for sure. My current report says I ate 4 veggies and 6 fruits, which is crazy low. I kind of think the past discussion suggested that if a person ate cabbage 4 times, that counted as one veggie, but I'm not sure, maybe 4 of the same counts as 4 . . . and I'm too lazy to recount my current week.

One thing I'm pretty sure of: If I log "Grandma's Thanksgiving Casserole" and it is actually one of those goopy things with canned green beans and canned mushroom soup with crunchy supposedly-onions on top, that's not going to be counted as a vegetable at all.

I suspect that even if I log "Sweet potato casserole with marshmallows", that might not be counted as a veggie, though it might. I'm sure that if I logged it that way and it also contained . . . I dunno, apples or pineapple or something . . . that fruit would not count as fruit. I'd bet that logging "Waldorf Salad" would count as zero fruit, too, even though it's mostly fruit. How would MFP's baby algorithm know there are even fruits in there? I regularly put a heap of frozen mixed berries in my morning yogurt, logged them as "Tree of Life Organic Mixed Berries Frozen", which contains 4 different types of berries. I'm quite certain MFP doesn't count those as 4. If I'm lucky, it might see "berries" and count one, if any.

For me, for sure, some of my daily veggies lately have been in frozen mixed veggies or frozen dinners, because I'm recuperating from an injury and keeping meal prep stupid simple as a consequence, different from my usual eating. Just glancing over my past week, I'd say there's a decent chance, not 100% certain, that MFP counted "Togarashi Green Beans" or "Organic Mixed Vegetables" each as one veggie.

I'm pretty sure they didn't count the "Vegetarian skillet" or "vegetarian omelet" I ate in restaurants as having any veggies, but of course they did. I also ate several frozen meals/mains, which I almost never do in normal circumstances, and I don't think those counted as vegetables at all, even those most of them had a lot of varied vegetables in them.

So: What did you actually log on Thanksgiving, under what name, and how likely is it that a new algorithm still in the beta stage would know if it was actually vegetables, let alone how much or how many different vegetables?

I suspect the answer to your question lies in that concept somewhere, but of course I have no evidence unless I were to look at your diary for the week. You might be able to figure it out, though.