food data base

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sallyhart790
sallyhart790 Posts: 1
in Food and Nutrition
I want to add a different serving size to a food already in the data base. Because the food is in the data base already I am unable to do so. I use this particular serving size in my daily meals. Is there a way to add the new serving size to an existing food.

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  • fia313
    fia313 Posts: 3 Member
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    Why are there 50 entries for the same food, most are wrong or so inaccurate they are worthless. Why aren't they consolidated and corrected for nutritional accuracy. It would so improve the information and experience.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,843 Member
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    fia313 wrote: »
    Why are there 50 entries for the same food, most are wrong or so inaccurate they are worthless. Why aren't they consolidated and corrected for nutritional accuracy. It would so improve the information and experience.

    Because the database is crowd-sourced, has been around a long time, and is international.

    Since regular users can enter foods, some of them do it badly.

    Products get reformulated, so old entries are still in the database. (Those usually only vary a little from current, but it can be dramatic.) The same-named commercial food can have a different formulation in different countries, plus countries' labeling rules vary surprisingly much.

    We - the users - administer the food database. MFP mostly doesn't. That means the database is quite comprehensive, and we can add things freely ourselves, but there are a lot of bad entries out there. The alternative, having the MFP staff curate the database closely would likely result in a database that wouldn't have nearly as comprehensive a scope, so we'd individually need to add lots more personal foods. It's a tradeoff.
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 10,020 Member
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    sallyhart790 wrote: »
    I want to add a different serving size to a food already in the data base. Because the food is in the data base already I am unable to do so. I use this particular serving size in my daily meals. Is there a way to add the new serving size to an existing food.

    Not really. The system wouldn't automatically adjust the values for calories and nutrients if you edited the entry and just changed the serving size. You would have to calculate all those values, based on the new serving size, and manually edit all of them. It seems like you might as well start from scratch and create a new entry, and leave the existing one as is for all the people who are using it.

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