PLEASE STOP! (If you don't know the nutritional values, don

Tzavush

Agreed!! To everything. I dislike when values are not complete and I am sure have had incorrect info at times.
I DO however tag when I notice something that differs greatly from the label I have. .
I didn't realize that Canadian and US calorie count would be different however.
I can understand different standards in other types of things on lables, but caloric value should be equivalent correct?

eeeekie

I agree. If you aren't sitting at your computer with the package next to you and adding the info the way IT IS SHOWN ON THE PACKAGE then do yourself and everyone else a favor and don't enter it into the database!

Yesterday I ate 2 packages of the Natures Valley oat bars and it said 0mg of sodium. Stupid me, believed it and come to find out it was 180mg of sodium. I changed it in the database today!

SMJohnson27

-BrandNewMia- im sorry i didnt mean to re-post ur quote there i was trying to reply to ur post which was a question , how can you tell when it from MFP? but i just reposted ur quote im not good with the whole message board thing

If it has a * in front of the items name, it is added from a user. Look for the ones that do not have the * in front of the name, it is from the MFP creators.

godblessourhome

Agreed!! To everything. I dislike when values are not complete and I am sure have had incorrect info at times.
I DO however tag when I notice something that differs greatly from the label I have. .
I didn't realize that Canadian and US calorie count would be different however.
I can understand different standards in other types of things on lables, but caloric value should be equivalent correct?

not only u.s. and canada, but east coast versus western states versus the south all can have different nutritional values for something.

godblessourhome

I have learned that when I find the correct value for a food that I am looking up, I save it in "My Meals" so I don't have to hunt for it again. What ticks me off is when I correct a particular item, then the next time I try to use it someone has changed it. Grr!!! :mad:

obviously if someone is changing it back, your information is incorrect for them. they are likely as equally frustrated having to 'correct' it time and again from your 'corrections'.

TS65

How do you tagg items if their incorrect???

When you search for a food by name, a list of possible items comes up. When you click on an item, a blue box will show up to the right of your screen where you can adjust the serving size and add it to your menu. At the top of that blue box is a link titled "nutritional info" If you click that link, it brings up the food label (of what should be the correct info). To the right of that box are 3 green boxes - it's asking you "Is this data accurate?" You can check Yes, No or I don't know. If it's wrong, click no (PLEASE!). If it's right click YES (PLEASE). The more people that click the right info, the easier it will be to weed out the right and wrong items.

Jujubie

I'm not sure that caloric value changes much but salt content does. For a reason I have yet to understand, there is much more salt in most Canadian versions of food, including cereal.

a_stronger_steph

Does anyone know... if someone changes the nutritional data for a food, is that change applied retroactively?

For example, let's say I ate a carrot and it said 5 calories, 1g carb, and logged that in my diary on Day 1.
Then on Day 2 someone changes the nutritional data for the particular "carrot" entry that I selected when I logged so that it is now 10 calories and 2 carbs (or whatever). Will my diary from Day 1 be changed automatically, or does it keep the original logged values?

lajuice24

This does annoy me also, but I use the app on my phone to scan the bar codes for the items I use if I can not find it, or I enter it into my meals. I know that is a pain but you do have to be accountable for yourself

TourThePast

How do you tagg items if their incorrect???

To the right of that box are 3 green boxes - it's asking you "Is this data accurate?" You can check Yes, No or I don't know. If it's wrong, click no (PLEASE!). If it's right click YES (PLEASE). The more people that click the right info, the easier it will be to weed out the right and wrong items.

Unfortunately most of my foods are added on the go, using the android app - which does not have this functionality.

I'm forever finding items which are clearly wrong, but do not have the opportunity to correct them. If sorting the database is a priority, this issue might be usefully addressed in the next android app update.

V44V

...and really, how many different BANANA options does a girl really need?

Same as cucumber, one...

chantalsantos

thank you:)

swest222

I completely agree ... being new and trying to navigate through all this has been very frustrating!!!!!!!!

heathersmilez

What ticks me off is when I correct a particular item, then the next time I try to use it someone has changed it. Grr!!! :mad:

When you click no and edit the item, it is saved to your account ONLY to avoid another duplicate and to help you know which version is right for you. It will never show you other's edits unless they add a new food and write things like "corrected" or "edited" in the title which is dumb and is congesting everything.

missbp

I just had the same thing happen to me about an hour ago. I was holding the dang package in my hand reading the info and the same exact product was entered into the system with 10 less calories.

M

heathersmilez

Also its sometimes different between countries, US vs Canada vs UK....etc. I noticed some people will label them (Canada) Fruit Loops, or something, but not everyone does. I thought it was interesting that a big brand would be different from place to place, but the labels are different, that could also be were some of this is coming from.

The geographical indicators are great, I do it all the time! Fiber One Cereal for example in the US has 60 cals and in Canada is has 100 Cals. Same goes for the Kellogg’s Fiber Plus bars, 9g fiber in the US and 5 in Canada. I contacted GM to ask why (I assumed a particular ingredient used in the US was not deemed safe by Health Canada) but found that the calculation is different, they wrote out the entire mathematical equation that each country uses so basically the truth of the food item is somewhere in between USA and Canada, then toss in other countries just for a more complicated measure, lol!

Walking2Lose

Being new here, I totall agree with a lot of you. I, too, find it frustrating that there are many choices. I always check the nutirional info before I add a food to any of my meals. And, I am thankful that my foods get saved to my meals so I don't have to re-enter the info in. I do write down the nutrional info so I can put the most accurate info in...The one thing that I don't do is tag an item when it is or might be incorrect...Only b/c I am not 100% sure that it is not accurate so I just leave it be.

It's nice to know I'm not alone.

jlsAhava

My turn! My turn!

I hate it when the serving size is simply listed as "1 serving" or "1 package" Um, exactly how much food is in that one serving or that one package?!? What if my package is bigger than yours, or your "serving" is has twice as much food than mine? That, to me, is the most useless kind of entry. It's simply meaningless unless you know the size of the serving! This problem also appears in when recipes are added (where you may be arbitrarily deciding how many servings the recipe makes) and the resulting nutritional data is based on "1 serving." While this may be okay the first time you enter it, it can be difficult to remember how many servings are in there altogether - even if it's your own recipe! If it's someone else's there's simply no way to figure out how big the serving is. ACK! :noway:

Lacey34

New to the program- this has all been very helpful! Thanks for the thread.

nyctraveler

I know! it's annoying to see oatmeal with no carbs or fruit with no sugar!!!

TourThePast

Ooh, yes that's another thing - for single word searches can we please have the basic plain foods come up first, rather than dishes in which they're an ingredient?

Earlier I wanted to know how many calories were in 100g of cherries. First item that came up on the search for "Cherries" was "Cherry tomatoes"! It then took ages to find measurements that weren't in cups (how do you accurately measure 1/3 of a cup of cherries?) and eventually I entered the variety I was eating (Glamour) into the database myself.

melsinct

I have been on a rampage lately, due to my discovery of 4 different Kashi cereal entries for the same product, 3 of which were wrong. Lately I have been confirming info on the items I use that are correct and if I have time, editing all of the wrong ones I encounter. Sooo frustrating. I don't think people should be allowed to add any food they want to the central database without first some sort of check to see if it already exists. That is how you end up with 15 entries for a medium banana, 7 Kashi entries, etc. Do people not bother looking before entering their food?

cckeimig

Don't forget that the nutrition values vary widely from country to country. I and i know some others are including thr country on the lable, also that items from multipacks differ from the single items, i note that too.

This is what I was going to mention, actually. Just for laughs, guys, look up McDonald's and all of the different versions of things. This is an international site, so it's best to do as has been suggested--have the label in your hand to verify, go with specific-country listings and how often things have been verified, and trust the basic MFP-provided values first off. Another thing I do is put in my own recipe for things that look wrong based on the quantities I've got in front of me vs. the mystery recipe that was used to log whatever food I'm trying to find.

heathersmilez

Do people not bother looking before entering their food?

One big problem causing duplicates is the fact the app doesn't have the same database, it's a tiny database so you are forced to add new foods all the time and I assume they are added into the general database on the website afterwards (when connected to wifi).

hayley_m

Go to a store or do some online browsing and look at the nutritional labels for three different honey hams from three different sources and you're likely to get three different results that way too. Yes, something like a chicken breast not havin protein entered is clearly wrong. But don't assume entries are "wrong" just because they're different.

Also keep in kind that companies themselves change nutritional info. Not long ago FiberOne 90 calories chocolate PB bars disappeared from the shelves and reappeared a few weeks later. When the new ones hit shelves again I picked up a box. Compared the info to the old box we still had at home (I buy 'em for the hubby mostly and he'd stockpiled when he saw they were disappearing from shelves) and two or three of the nutritional items had changed. And when I took one to throw in the car when I'd be on the road for awhile, when I went to enter it in MFP, all of the entries were "wrong" because they still had the old info. So I had to create a new entry that matched the new label. No one had entered the info wrong, it just became wrong as soon as the company updated their label.

Thank you I'm glad you wrote all that and I didn't have to!! I once had two special k bars, one in my handbag and then j bought one for my friend from a different shop, exactly the same bar but had different nutritional values!! Products change slot and this site has been running for a while so it may be different because of that!! Also I agree with maybe having different country data bases, here in the uk a lot of our foods don't have or don't list sodium, so when I enter food in the database if it says trace of sodium then I put the minimum amount or 0, it doesn't mean I'm not entering it correctly it's just the info I have!! Just remember that thousands of people use this site and it's proven that it works, surely getting irate over this minor problem isn't worth all the good that comes from it!!
To sum up, I just wouldn't be so quick to come down on the users of MFP for creating a messy database. There are a lot of factors out there that contribute to multiple and different entries. And I didn't even touch on how labels for the same exact products could be different between the US and other countries due to their food labeling laws. lol

hayley_m

Poopy I knew my iPod would muck that up!! Keeps glitching!! My comment is in there somewhere!!!

NeuroticVirgo

Also its sometimes different between countries, US vs Canada vs UK....etc. I noticed some people will label them (Canada) Fruit Loops, or something, but not everyone does. I thought it was interesting that a big brand would be different from place to place, but the labels are different, that could also be were some of this is coming from.

The geographical indicators are great, I do it all the time! Fiber One Cereal for example in the US has 60 cals and in Canada is has 100 Cals. Same goes for the Kellogg’s Fiber Plus bars, 9g fiber in the US and 5 in Canada. I contacted GM to ask why (I assumed a particular ingredient used in the US was not deemed safe by Health Canada) but found that the calculation is different, they wrote out the entire mathematical equation that each country uses so basically the truth of the food item is somewhere in between USA and Canada, then toss in other countries just for a more complicated measure, lol!

Just even more proof that even while tracking and writing down it is completely an estimation of what your actually eating for the day. lol We will never know for sure whats right and whats not haha.

mrssavvysteve

...and really, how many different BANANA options does a girl really need?

:laugh:

LOL--- Everytime I eat a banana I'm like seriously... The other day I actually measured my banana with a ruler!

supercatie18

100% agree..hopefully this will help!

skinnyhopes

...and really, how many different BANANA options does a girl really need?

SOOOOOOOOOOO true, there are like a million options.

For fruits, veggies and meats I only use the foods that were entered by MFP specifically and NOT the users. Foods in the database that begin with a * were entered by MFP users and I just don't trust 'em!

I do the same