Angry! Your messing up the food database!!

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  • sassyg
    sassyg Posts: 393
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    2 things that would be helpful:

    1st, seeing AT LEAST the calorie count before you enter it into your diary. That way, if it is wildly wrong, you can see that before you even add it.

    2nd, being able to "share" foods with the people you choose. My husband is trying to start on here, and he gets frustrated trying to search for things that I already have in my diary, or if I did a "my food" (I just made a bunch of muffins) I have to share it so he can have it as well.

    As nice as a clean up would be, I think these things would cut down on a lot of peoples search times.

    You can do the first - click on nutritional info just under the title of the food, it brings it up in a wee popup
  • iamhealingmyself
    iamhealingmyself Posts: 579 Member
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    I know what you mean!! I have come seen fried chicken, double cheeseburgers, homemade hash browns, and asian stir fry with noodles all entered in with NO CARBS!! Yeah, right!!
    LOL the perfect food!!! Sign me up I'll buy a case of everything!!

    I usually find the one with the highest confirmations and compare it to my label first time and then use my recent/favorites or save things as a meal so I have them quick and easy. Hardest part is finding something that's right then going back for it weeks or months later and you can't find it again.

    I think there should be some type of filtering available - either you enter all the nutritional information or you enter calories only - the two are kept separate so we who want all the data don't have to review the nutritional information of every item in the list to find what we're looking for. And every so often they should go back and combine those that are the same but maybe miss some info to make one more complete item rather than two incomplete ones. And any company that uses a database should have the adequate means to manage that database, not matter how many are using it.

    I could never understand how a gallon of whole milk could have such varying information - the exact same product - like a walmart (great value) brand - many many entries all with different information. How is that even possible? Does walmart really manufacture whole milk in varying degrees of nutrition? It's getting to the point that we really can't even trust the labels any more too so it's not just the website at fault.

    I picked something the other day and didn't bother to check the values. When I saw on my meal it had like 1800 calories I almost fell over. Needless to say I picked the wrong one. :laugh:
  • iamhealingmyself
    iamhealingmyself Posts: 579 Member
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    DB definatly needs a good cleaning. Is there a way to sort by # of confirmations or whether it was add by an MFP member?

    I've asked for this.... No response from the developers :(

    I am the admin for a similar style database/website system at my work. In my experience, a large database cleansing and data verifying like this would take 100's of man (or woman) hours. That is very expensive. I don't know if it would be feasible to keep this site free and have that done. Plus as long as anyone can make entries, a data cleansing would only be for a while before everything gets mucked up again.

    :flowerforyou: I think the site is great, but since it is free I don't expect it to be perfect. :flowerforyou:
    Volunteers could do the job. There would have to be standards set by MFP though so that we all followed the same rules when cleaning. It could be done. Those of us who use the site diligently and passionately wouldn't mind giving back a little of our time for all that we get for free. Same thing with monitoring the boards for spammers and trollers.
  • FearAnLoathing
    FearAnLoathing Posts: 4,852 Member
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    :heart:
  • iamhealingmyself
    iamhealingmyself Posts: 579 Member
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    Agree and very annoyed at the enormous amount of ridiculous items listed incorrectly. Good thing I'm not running it, I'd ban the people trying to cheat the system.

    If it's a country thing, I dunno, put some sort of marker on it. When I have to sit here for what seems like forever to find correct stuff, it seems almost pointless.

    Maybe start making rules to post an entry to the database, otherwise keep them to yourself? Say, a 3 month probation period? lol
    maybe along those lines they could add a country field to the database (easy enough to do) and this way we'd know at a glance if that's a us food or from somewhere else - at least this would narrow down the search list when we're sifting through things.
  • laurenk182004
    laurenk182004 Posts: 1,882 Member
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    Where's the LIKE button?

    :D

    facebook_like_button_big.jpg

    I likey! :bigsmile:
  • iamhealingmyself
    iamhealingmyself Posts: 579 Member
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    I think country to country may vary ,plus I think some people new to this site may not look at the package size as I cant see anyone entering the wrong info just to keep their diary down ,it is time consumming looking through loads of stuff .


    I saw this "*Generic - Brewed Coffee With Non Dairy Creamer & 3 Tsp Sugar" at 30 calories.......the sugar alone is 30 calories (minimum) and as most people dont use a level teaspoon its likely higher, creamer really packs a punch and is probably at least twice the calories possibly thrice, thats not accidental, at best its lazy but more likely to be cheating themselves. I noticed this entry because a friend added it to her diary...x3 cuppas. Thats a lot of extra calories she thought she could consume because someone was trying to fiddle their own numbers

    I use the plain coffee -brewed from grounds and that has 6 calories before you even add anything to it. When something looks too good to be true, I'll usually check other sites and compare then enter my own if I need to get "closer" without having the actual labels.
  • iamhealingmyself
    iamhealingmyself Posts: 579 Member
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    1 calorie per 100ml for Diet Coke here...
    people often forget that that's a PER SERVING rate too - often those bottles/cans are listed as 2 or more servings. So even if technically it's .5 calories per serving they'd probably list it as 0 but if you drank the entire thing you're looking at 1-2 calories depending on servings.
  • Cmuchoa
    Cmuchoa Posts: 161 Member
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    I agree - am only here for not even two weeks yet and everyday I am sitting at the computer with different food packages in front of me entering the correct details - hopefully with everyone's input all will be corrected soon.
  • micklepickle61
    micklepickle61 Posts: 73
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    Holy Cow. I haven't been paying attention. I was blindly trusting that everything was accurate and on the up and up. (Story of my life :smile: )
  • TheMaidOfAstolat
    TheMaidOfAstolat Posts: 3,222 Member
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    Ya'll do realize that food is entered into the system from all over the world, right?

    The same food will have different nutrient counts in those different countries.

    In addition....food companies change recipes from time to time...therefor the need for more new DB entries.

    Get off your high horse and deal with it!
  • momofssc
    momofssc Posts: 11 Member
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    I totally agree. When in doubt, use calorieking.com to double check the numbers. I find it's close about 98% of the time.
  • rcrea
    rcrea Posts: 80
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    I had this problem when I first got on here as well. I was sabotaging my diet the more and more I tried to figure out how to prepare my meals using the database. Finally I resolved to sticking with atkins shakes, lean cuisines, and weight watchers meals until I can get an accurate handle on this. It's too important for me to know exactly what I'm intaking and there is just too much guess work involved with the database. I still track everything, but when I input now, I can double check against what the label says in front of me.

    It's made a big difference for me.
  • eystelle
    eystelle Posts: 31
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    I didn't even know ppl were doing that! Is it that serious that they have to lie and mess everyone else up ugh!
  • rileysowner
    rileysowner Posts: 8,238 Member
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    I agree. There needs to be a clean up and there needs to be differentiation between different countries, and possible more. I know between Canada and the US there are major difference in nutritional information on many products.
  • exercisechic927
    exercisechic927 Posts: 64 Member
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    Thank you I didnt know they were all messed up! Not good for watching calories! I never add any!
  • cardbucfan
    cardbucfan Posts: 10,416 Member
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    So agree with the OP's rant. Yet another reason why I don't eat all my calories back. I try to be really diligent with what I add but I have a life and can't spend that much time researching everything I eat. So, I try to pick the highest calories item (if I don't know for sure what the counts are) and leave myself a cushion at the end of the day.
  • loriefolk
    loriefolk Posts: 352
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    Thank you!! You are SO right! I had to enter my tortilla earlier and found (3) of the exact same tortillas all with different cal counts. I actually had to add my own and put the RIGHT amounts in! It was so frustrating! :mad:
  • sassyg
    sassyg Posts: 393
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    I also wonder, how much of the wrong calorie values are people overseas converting kilojoules-calories or grams-ounces wrongly.

    If I do it in my head, I work on 4 kilojoules being 1 calorie, although for an accurate conversion I should be using 4.18. It can make a difference over a large value. Also grams to ounces I say 30 because its easier to do the math in my head, but it's more like 28.3.
  • Fat2FitChick
    Fat2FitChick Posts: 451 Member
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    Ya'll do realize that food is entered into the system from all over the world, right?

    The same food will have different nutrient counts in those different countries.

    In addition....food companies change recipes from time to time...therefor the need for more new DB entries.

    Get off your high horse and deal with it!

    It's not a high horse, it's called frustration. Oh wait my bad. I forgot you don't get upset about anything or have a problem with anything.

    Just because it doesn't bother you doesn't mean I am wrong for having it bother me, so you get off your high horse, please.

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