Meeting Nutritional Guidelines

I would love a feature like that.

I'm afraid I don't have much confidence in the government to tell me what I should and shouldn't be eating.

In the 1940's choose grapefruit, tomato or orange and have 1 a day. Have meat, poultry, fish, beans or nuts occasionally. Oh and a pint of whole milk a day.

In the 1950's at least 1 egg a day. Still a grapefruit, tomato or orange a day. Minimum 2 tablespoons butter a day.

It wasn't until through the 60's into the 70's that meat/legumes/nuts was removed from "occasional" and minimum servings recommended.

The 80's, well no more eggs! They raise your cholesterol, cause heart attacks, bad. Bad eggs. The egg industry was all flustered about this one but people gave up their eggs. The very same ones they were told to eat at least 1 of 30 years prior.

Then the 90's with 6-11 servings of grains, cereals and breads. I don't think I could eat that in a day. Eggs are still bad for you.

Now here we are and the government is going to issue new guidelines and eggs are back! Yes, they are now good for you and don't contribute to cholesterol totals and oopsie. They are actually great nutrition!

We've had the food wheel, pyramid, plate, something that looks like a DNA helix and various show and tells. There was a time where coffee was bad for you, wait, coffee is ok. Alcohol is the devil, wait, a certain amount of a certain kind of alcohol is actually good for you. Fat is bad for you, it's making you fat, never ever eat it! wait, fat is ok, but good fat. Actually all but saturated fat is ok. Well, make that trans fat. Yeah, saturated and trans, don't eat those and we'll see how it goes for a few generations and we'll let you know if we were right or wrong.

I do not trust the government to tell me what to eat.

https://fnic.nal.usda.gov/dietary-guidance/dietary-guidelines/historical-dietary-guidance

I don't see it as needful for me.

Here's why: I made it a goal when I was earlier in using MFP to get a minimum of 5 80-gram servings of varied, colorful veggies/fruits daily, and to shoot for 10 or more 80-gram servings daily, so 400 to 1000+ grams total.

I weigh most of my food (when you learn the tricks, it's easier/quicker than cups/spoons, and more accurate than that let alone compared to eyeballing). That makes it super easy to look through my diary and add up the number of veggie/fruit grams. I can rough-add in my head, or use a calculator if I care to be precise.

After working at this for a while, changing my routine habits to fit in more variety/volume of veggies and fruits, I normally hit the minimum with zero conscious thought, and usually even exceed the stretch goal. Along the way, I was helped by participating in a challenge thread here years back where people were shooting for 10 servings daily.

If there's a rare day where I'm under 400g, I don't stress about it. Usually it's because of some unusual circumstances (like when traveling). I know it's the majority of my days that will deliver the majority of my health results, so I don't see the point of worrying about the odd off-pattern day now and then.

With a history of system development and data management, I think this would be harder to include in MFP than it might seem on the surface. It would be necessary to go through the entire (crowd-sourced) database and add this data, in order to have a robust solution.

It could be easier to do that with simple foods (a single item), maybe even approachable with AI. But I don't see how it could accurately happen for the many, many database entries that are whole dishes. If we're looking at an entry like "beef stew" or "lasagna" or the like, how is anyone going to guess how many veggie servings are included?

Also, different nutritional bodies define "one serving" differently for counting purposes. MFP usually follow US official nutritional guidelines, but (last I looked) the US guidelines would be especially hard to program in accurately, since different amounts (in cups, usually) apply to different veggies/fruits. Generically, the servings for dried fruit are smaller, most whole fruits or veg are 1 cup, leafy greens are more than that, I think juice is different still. That it's so weird is why I don't personally count that way.

MFP could relatively more easily add a new field to capture the info, and let users populate it gradually, but I have a hard time believing enough people would do that accurately to make it worthwhile. That's still a lot of work, given the age and complexity of the MFP software. We'd be counting on those (historically inaccurate) users to follow some written guideline about what constitutes a serving - I'd give that low odds of working.

Just my opinions, though.

If you want MFP to add a feature the place to suggest it is here:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/categories/feature-suggestions-and-ideas

The MFP staff don't read all of the thousands of daily posts everywhere in the Community. They do read the feature suggestions, and usually respond to them. Other people have suggested somewhat similar ideas in the past, but I'm not sure whether this exact thing has been suggested or not.