“Find a better replacement” for scanned foods
One thing that happens quite often:
You are in a store. You find a food, drink, or ingredient. You scan the barcode. Cronometer finds it. Great. (If not, it's super easy to add it as a Custom Food)
But then you add the entry, and it only contains the basic nutrition label values:
Energy, kcal, protein, carbs, fat, salt, sugar, maybe saturated fat if we are lucky.
Basically, the usual “this is technically food” label data.
What I would love is a feature that lets you find a nutritionally similar replacement from a richer sources like NCCDB or USDA.
For example, when selecting a food from their diary, user can have Cronometer compare the added product against database foods and suggest close matches based on things like:
- Calories/Energy
- Protein
- Carbohydrates
- Fat
- Sugar
- Salt/sodium
- Fiber, if available
Then the user could choose one of two options:
- Use the better database item instead
- Enrich the scanned food entry using the better database match
The second option would be especially useful. The barcode item would still represent the actual product I bought, but Cronometer could fill in missing micronutrients and other details using the best available equivalent.
Obviously, it should be clear that the enriched data is estimated, not lab-tested for that exact product. But in many cases, an informed estimate from NCCDB or USDA would be far better than having no data at all.
This would be incredibly useful for generic foods and ingredients like oats, rice, milk, flour, chicken, yogurt, canned tomatoes, protein drinks, and so on.
Right now, I often manually search for a better database item anyway, so having Cronometer assist with this would save time and probably improve data quality.