EU Food Labeling & Users Adding to the Database

I'm from the US and I have been living in Europe for 8 years now. In recent years Europe has started including food nutrition labeling that just seems so behind the US (if there is a label at all) :ohwell: .

Already you lack a lot of information that is included on US labels (sodium being the biggest one) and there doesn't seem to be any mandatory requirements because the labeling varies product to product. Some will tell you more information than others (again, I'll bring up sodium) yet I found this:

Q&A on the new EU food labeling rules: http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/lsa/124805.pdf

Often things that exist in one country may have different values in another. I know that the coca cola recipe and nutella recipe vary for sure because of laws regarding ingredients.

However my biggest pet peeve is the 100g thing. SOME labels will tell you the values per portion but it isn't the case on many things which can be particularly irritating when they are in individual portions in the package (a piece of frozen fish for instance). I believe this is a real hindrance to the consumer because if you are not careful, values on a package can appear to be less bad than they really are.

With MFP we are all clearly here because we are watching what we eat, our reasons and goals may vary, but our tools are the same. I know it is tougher when you live overseas because it is a lot of manually adding things and basically building the database ourselves. I'm just wondering if we can try to help each other out and create some kind of mutual standard when adding things.

So here's some ideas that I will just toss out there (feel free to add your own or offer/share how you handle things) :flowerforyou:

__Global Brands/Franchises__

Usually when I add items that I know exist in other countries (be it large global brands like Coke or even global franchises like Mc Donald's or Subway) I tend to add the country name with the brand. This prevents people from complaining that values are WAY off when it could be because someone in another country edited it. It makes it easier to be sure it matches where you are coming from when you want to add it to your diary as well.

__100g and Serving Size__

Again this irritates me the most and makes keeping track of my food really hard simply because everything becomes algebra when you want to add a slice of bread or a package of rice or whatever. RARELY is 100g the serving size of what you are adding. So why not take the time to input the value per serving size the first time and save everyone else (and yourself in the future) from having to do math to add a slice of bread?

I know I personally sit there and figure everything out (netweight divided by portions to find out serving size, to take the 100g and fit every value to the serving size which I clearly specify to be the gram amount with "1 slice of bread" or whatever in parenthesis next to it) to come across someone who lazily added the 100g value to where I then have to go back and edit the entry and do what they didn't want to.:grumble: It is very very time consuming.

I know it is a pain the first time, but in the end we can all help each other out and have one less hurdle to our motivation to keep track of things as time goes on. Besides, as I pointed out, RARELY is a serving size 100g anyway. Are the rest of those people doing individual math every time to add it to their diary? It sounds annoying.

Serving size: <Weight in grams>, (Physical description/Slice, Cookie, Piece etc) all added values correspond to serving size as they should.


__Product Name/Accents__

I live in France, so this accent thing may not be applicable to everyone, but if you live in a foreign country where accents are used, can we please try to add them to the product name? I know that with MFP names get funky with accents (every character following the accent becomes capitalized), but if you search for the name of a product with the accents included and someone added it to the database WITHOUT the accents, that item will show up as not found. So usually what happens you go to add it to the database to get an error telling you that it already exists. It can be extremely annoying if you're not aware what causes that issue and you think MFP is having a bug or something.

If you search for an item without the accents and it has accents in the name it can find the item even with the accents, but for some reason this doesn't work in reverse. Since I assume not everyone knows this, it would probably be best if we all tried to just add the name correctly the first time.

Anyway, these are just some thoughts I have had since joining and using MFP. It is pretty hard if you're outside the US, but I think with a little effort we can make it easier for ourselves and others so we can all reach our goals. ^^