Again --- have any of the coders actually cooked?

tittiger

I am really tired and am not going into details and thank God I am not tracking right now, but it is close to impossible to enter accurate recipes the way things are set up. I can not believe how bad it is sometimes and am angry that my time is being wasted because I am being put into the position where I am going to have to come back and double check each and every single recipe someday if I want it to be at all accurate.

If someone has a few minutes enter Recipe #3418097, Data Source: Custom manually and you will see what I mean.

Thanks for listening to my early morning rant guys.

One hint - remember that coconut milk comes as fluid ounces and the software is ambiguous and likely uses weight ounces. This is just the beginning of FUBAR involved with entering this recipe....

Another --- try entering Turmeric as an ingredient... even finding it was a real challenge. I almost gave up. I guess I need to add it as a personal food, but my contacts acting up has added much difficulty to that task.

Marie_Eve_Cronometer

Hello @tittiger ,

You have identified one of the toughest parts about tracking nutrition - the best way to record the ingredients in mixed dishes.

The most accurate way to record your ingredients is also the most time-consuming. Cook and then weigh each ingredient separately then mix them together before you eat them. Record the weight of each cooked ingredient in your recipe. There are differences in nutrients in a cooked vs. raw food, so entering in the values as cooked foods will also give you a more accurate nutrient profile.

In the case where you have already prepared your recipe and it is not an option to separate out the ingredients, change the recipe to servings based, rather than weight-based. This will give you an estimate of your nutrient intake, but keep in mind the nutrients found in raw vs. cooked food will be different. The biggest difference can usually be found in the water content, as you have noticed. If you are tracking your water intake very closely, you may consider adding water to your recipe and then entering a negative number to account for the water loss that occurred during cooking.

I've also noticed that there was an ingredient with an 'Unknown Weight' in your recipe. Currently, when there is no weight set for a food, which happens for branded food measured in ml, our system automatically calculates that weight as 100 g. We are looking into improving this, but it is a challenge as the software requires weights for all food items in our system. The solution to this problem is to change the ingredients to ones with weights or add weights to the items if they are custom foods. If it is a product from our database, making copies of those foods listed and ensuring a weight is specified works as well. If you have a kitchen scale you can weigh a sample of the liquid to determine the gram weight and then create a serving size in the editor to map that volume measure to it's weight. If you don't care about perfect accuracy for your item, most liquids are close to 1ml=1g as a decent estimate.

It is a trade-off between how accurate you would like to be in your food diary and how much time you would like to put in to it.

Cheers,

tittiger

Thanks for this info Marie.

I am an engineer by training and can figure out ways to do this, my point is that I don't know how they let it be released in it's present condition.

As things stand I just don't have the time to do it the way that you suggest, though I will look at it in the future for some tips when I might have the time.

I can accept small errors. I don't need perfection at this stage of the game.

But most of my issues were with very simple things that could have been taken care of by the coders, like the right units t being available and me not having to jump thorough a bunch of hoops to get the proper units.

Some of the ingredients are alike an alpha release of software. No way ready to be used by your customers.

Sorry I should give you a better more detailed response but I am having "one of those days". (from hell) :-)

I will try to be more succinct and keep it to one one example the next time I encounter an issue like this, and perhaps we will make more progress.

Thanks again...
Joe