Publishing a food to the CRDB Database: just copy food label or base on detailed database entries?
I could participate in populating Cronometer Community Database with local barcoded foods.
Though the following question arises.
Only Energy, Proteins, Fats and Carbohydrates are specified on food labels here in Russia.
Still many foods have detailed info in NCCDB and other databases.
So, for example, if this is an egg, I can either
(a) specify only Energy, Proteins, Fats and Carbohydrates from https://vkusvill.ru/goods/yaytso-kurinoe-s1.html (but all the other nutrients would be missing, so the daily picture would be completely wrong),
(b) simply create a copy of "Raw Egg" (Food #458148 in NCCDB), rename it to this particular product and add a barcode,
(c) create a copy of "Raw Egg" (Food #458148 in NCCDB) but edit values for Carbs, Fat and Protein, as they are a little bit slightly different,
(d) do (c) but based on "Eggs, Cooked" (Food #464674 in NCCDB).
In these simple cases option (c) looks optimal to me.
It's harder to deal with variety of local foods. For example, there are only 3 varieties of Farmer Cheese in NCCDB, but 49 varieties in https://vkusvill.ru/goods/molochnye_produkty_yaytso/tvorog1/.
So if missing all the nutrients (and having completely wrong daily picture) is not an option, there are 3 ways to deal with it:
(1) create a copy of the closest entry from NCCDB and edit only Energy, Carbs, Fat and Protein,
(2) create a copy of the closest entry from NCCDB and edit Energy, Carbs, Fat and Protein, as well as to linearly change subcategories of Carbs, Fat and Protein,
(3) find the closest entry in some local database (though there seems to be only one public database, hosted at intelmeal.ru).
Option 3 here looks optimal to me.
It's even harder to deal with processed food, as it becomes harder to find pretty close food in databases.
For example, peanut paste (https://vkusvill.ru/goods/arakhisovaya-pasta-klassicheskaya.html) has nothing else but roasted peanuts in Ingredients, still 100 g of it has 11.6 g of Carbs, while "Peanut Butter, Natural, Unsalted" (Food #1814179 in NCCDB) has 21.26 g of Carbs.
More complicated cases of food like borscht or honey cakes are present in NCCDB, though the recipes and therefore nutrition may vary.
Still in such cases options 2 and 3 mentioned above look optimal to me.
What are the best practices here?