Can this app count fruits and vegetables?

adamsae1207
adamsae1207 Posts: 3 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Counting carbs is all good. However I am finding it very odd that this app cannot help me tally and track my fruit and vegetable intake. This a major flaw. I am going to discontinue this app for this reason

Answers

  • snowflake954
    snowflake954 Posts: 8,399 Member
    I track all my fruits and vegetables. I weigh them on my digital food scale and log them in my food diary---everyday. I don't know why you're having trouble doing this.
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,906 Member
    Can you clarify what you mean? Do you try to track servings of fruit and veg, 5 a day, or other things? Keep in mind that this app is a worldwide thing. 5 a day is British, servings are possibly not a thing outside of the US (or the amount might differ).

    But you can of course track every fruit and veg you eat in grams, big/medium/small things, as 1 apple, even in cups if you search.
  • adamsae1207
    adamsae1207 Posts: 3 Member
    Snowflake, the app DOES NOT count them, the way it counts carbs, calories, macros, etc etc. This is a problem.
  • adamsae1207
    adamsae1207 Posts: 3 Member
    The app does not tally these for you. It only tallies calories, carbs, proteins, fats, etc.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,102 Member
    Since I weigh my food to calorie count, I aim for a minimum of 400 grams of veggies and fruit daily, and ideally 800 grams or more. I usually get to the 800 grams. As I'm planning dinner, if I'm not sure where I stand, I total up the grams so far and use that in my dinner plan.

    That works for me.

    I know there are some new ideas about eating 30 different veggies (or veggies/fruits, or plants) per week, which seems to be about pursuing gut health/diverse gut microbiome.

    I get the point intellectually, but don't really see the point for me personally. I do make it a point to eat a diversity of veggies and fruit across days/week. I do mix it up, because I'm easily bored.

    I've never added up how many different ones I eat for a week. It seems fussy and annoying, so I get why you'd want an app to do it for you. One observation I'd make is that different advocates have different rules for what to count.

    How is MFP to know which foods count, in that context? Because MFP's food database is crowd sourced, it seems like there are 3 possibilities for getting that information:

    1. Asking the user who inputs the food whether it's a plant, veggie, fruit. Since the crowd doesn't even reliably type in label information, I personally wouldn't trust their guess.
    2. Using algorithms and data tables to parse the food names to see if they represent a known veggie/fruit/plant. This isn't going to be easy (or very accurate) either.
    3. Using new and magical AI that everyone seems to think can solve all problems. Layering that on top of an older app is not easy, it would be expensive to do at this point, and it takes time (and masses of relevant data) to train the silly things. Improbable, any time soon, IMO.

    MFP is now a "legacy app", i.e., old for a piece of technology. Any kind of change is hard fought, realistically. In a mass market setting, this kind of thing probably doesn't make sense. Statistics suggest only a few people even care how many veggies/fruits they eat.

    Just for fun, I counted how many different veggies/fruits I ate yesterday. It was 8. If I count other plant foods (nuts, seeds, whole grains), there are 4 more. That would be 12. I'm only counting so-called "whole" foods. I ate other things that are traditional plant-sourced foods, but more processed (example: tofu), but didn't count those. If one day was 8 or 12, I'm guessing I'm good for 30 different ones per week or close, even though there will be some repeats.

    Bottom line: To me, it seems like enough just to eat a whole bunch of varied, colorful veggies and fruits every day and across days, but maybe I'm missing out on a gut health boost I'm not aware of. I'll take that chance. :flowerforyou:

    Since you, OP, do want that feature, I hope you find what you're looking for, sincerely.
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,906 Member
    adamsae1207 wrote: »
    The app does not tally these for you. It only tallies calories, carbs, proteins, fats, etc.

    Yes, it’s not an item tallying app but a calorie counting app for weight management. Tallying certain food things has no relevance for calories.

    What you want is probably out there somewhere, if not for fruit and veg then for general things. Heck, you could create a spreadsheet on your phone with a list of common fruit and veg you eat and just enter the numbers as you go through the day. Even with conditional formatting like display total number per day red if below x and green if at least y. Lots if things would be arbitrary, like grapes, salad (how much), basically big or small food items.
  • snowflake954
    snowflake954 Posts: 8,399 Member
    edited November 2023
    adamsae1207 wrote: »
    Snowflake, the app DOES NOT count them, the way it counts carbs, calories, macros, etc etc. This is a problem.

    In a way it does because it breaks them down into carbs, sugars,.......etc. That IS counting.

    Do you want MFP to tell you that you ate 2 apples, 3 oranges, and 2 zucchini today? If so, that's not very accurate since the sizes of apples, oranges, and zucchini all differ. I want to know how many calories and macros they have. THAT'S useful information FOR ME.

    So, hope you fine your app and it satisfies all your needs.

    PS: I think there is a "Notes" section on your food diary. You could note there each fruit and vegetable you eat each day.
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 28,052 Member
    yirara wrote: »
    Can you clarify what you mean? Do you try to track servings of fruit and veg, 5 a day, or other things? Keep in mind that this app is a worldwide thing. 5 a day is British, servings are possibly not a thing outside of the US (or the amount might differ).

    But you can of course track every fruit and veg you eat in grams, big/medium/small things, as 1 apple, even in cups if you search.

    @adamsae1207 if you are using the British 5 portions per day, that's 80 grams per portion. You could do this and aim for 400 grams:
    COGypsy wrote: »
    You could name one of your meal slots Fruit and Veg or something and make those entries in that meal area. Then you could see at a glance how many servings you’d had in that food group.

    Apparently, in the US the metric is cups per day:

    https://www.myplate.gov/eat-healthy/fruits (1.5-2C; see table in link)
    https://www.myplate.gov/eat-healthy/vegetables (2-3C; see table in link)

    @adamsae1207 MFP isn't going to collect anything that isn't on US food labels. Here are the fields for which MFP collects data:

    fi9w3k104bvg.png

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,102 Member
    Just as a background observation, this idea (trendy now) is not about eating a large volume of veggies, it's about eating a diversity of them (and maybe other plant foods, depending on which expert is opining).

    The point is gut microbiome diversity.

    Here's part of an article (edited a bit by me) from a mainstream source that I don't think is paywalled:
    . . . .
    Everyone seems to be talking about gut health.
    . . . .

    The obsession isn’t without basis. A healthy gut is a major part of our overall health, and can improve the immune system, regulate hormones, and even boost our mood.
    . . . .
    A healthy gut doesn’t mean abiding by a strict set of food rules, hacks, or food restrictions.

    Instead, eating a diverse range of plants through an abundance mindset is the only rule Dr. Megan Rossi, author of How To Eat More Plants and Love your Gut, and a practicing dietitian and nutritionist, promotes.

    “We can control the health of our gut microbiome, and the key predictor of that is diversifying your plants,” she tells Fortune.

    In short, the more variety of plants you eat, the better. While it may seem ambitious, Rossi recommends aiming for 30 different plants a week from the super six: whole grains (think: quinoa, rolled oats, and sourdough bread), nuts and seeds (walnuts, pistachios, and pecans), vegetables, fruits, legumes (think: beans), and herbs and spices (cumin, cinnamon, and paprika).

    From: https://fortune.com/well/2023/03/20/improve-gut-health-diversity-diet-eat-30-plants-a-week/

    Ellipses show where I cut out some stuff, and the bold is mine.

    I think the bolded is important, personally.

    Some of the health (alt-health?) blogosphere/media are trying to make this yet another forced march to a specific numeric goal. I think that's misplaced.

    I can see the point of gamifying the process of increasing plant-food diversity, as a fun thing. At one point, I did a challenge that involved a daily checklist where I ticked off how many different colors of veggies/fruit I ate that day. It was fun, and it challenged me to improve diversity. But I didn't think it was some kind of magical formula that guaranteed good health, just a fun game that helped me pursue generally better nutrition.

    To me, that can be the problem around "30 per week": Sometimes it's presented as applied magic, a spell or essential formula. It's not.

    By analogy, that's like some people's reaction to the research that says older people who have better grip strength live longer. That's a true factoid IMU, but if someone thinks that means they should start improving their grip strength (and only that), they're missing the main point.
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,906 Member
    Tbh, eating as many different fruit and veg per day would not be possible for me. I live along, only have a small fridge and freezer, and portions of both tend to be big here. Thus I'd throw most away if I were to eat a much bigger variability. But yeah, I'm sure many people will manage, especially if they have a family.
  • Sett2023
    Sett2023 Posts: 158 Member
    I eat a lot of different vegetables in each meal, but only because I tend to be easily bored by eating the same things.

    And, obviously, I can because I have not only one, but two big freezers. We decided many years ago to invest (money... and space!) in them so that we could batch cook, and it had been a great decision.

    We buy a lot of different vegetables every Friday and nothing goes wasted, we have always a lot stored and at each meal we have at least 3-4 different kinds of veg (so at least 6-8/day only of veg), and cooked in different manners too. Usually, I can do 3 days without repeating kinds.

    [I use batch cooking also for fish (patties, of salmon and codfish), poultry ("pollo alla cacciatora", that I make my way, that is with a looot of vegetables directly in) etc etc.]

    What I find difficult, instead, is varying fruits, because obviously those I can't cook, so here we risk wasting. So, I buy 70 fruits/week (we do shopping for 5, 'cause my parents live next to us: 2 fruits/day for person), but the choice tends to be limited 'cause a lot of kinds have to be consumed very quickly. At the end, the first 2/3 days after shopping we vary a lot, but the other 4 is above all apples...

    About MFP, instead, what I miss is the possibility to separate sugar/carbs of vegs from sugar/carbs of other foods. I think that for diabetics sugar is sugar (not sure!) but many people have to pay attention only to certain kinds of sugar (in fact, sugar from vegs helps), so it'd be useful have two different lines to register them.
  • neanderthin
    neanderthin Posts: 10,201 Member
    edited November 2023
    Plant diversity for gut microbiome and concluding it's beneficial seems to be a forgone conclusion and considered settled science, but with almost 3/4 of the American population complaining of GI issues it's difficult to discuss what the true burden might be. Could it be certain plant compounds? We know refined carbohydrates and sugar are problematic for starters, gluten, lectins, oxalates, phytic acid, tannis, saponins, are all compounds that can cause gut issues and not talking about allergies to certain foods for example.

    Individuals exist on a tolerance spectrum which are influenced by many factors that include a persons existing health status, ethnicity, age, gender etc. The spectrum's scope can be from non existent or minimal to highly effected depending on outright intolerances to mildly effected, so everyone will have different experiences when it comes to gut issues and how that effects their microbiome and like I said 3/4 of the population have some issue or issues. It's why fodmap and elimination diets exist. Also why a low carb and ketogenic diet seems to lessen and resolve many gut issues, science just doesn't know enough right now, so it's just not that cut and dry. imo

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