Filter Oracle 'suggest foods' to only 'whole foods' and not recipes

edited June 2020 in Feature Requests

Hi. I recently subscribed for the first time, in large part because I wanted to try out the Oracle. I'm disappointed that it always brings up vague recipes like 'Sub Sandwich, Meatball and Spaghetti sauce' how do I know what that's supposed to consist or how to make it? What does the spaghetti sauce contain? Even if I tried to make it, I could be wildly off with completely different nutrients. It'd be so much more useful to me if I could instead click 'suggest foods' and ask which whole foods would give me the nutrients I need, and it could come up with, for example:

  1. '15g cheddar cheese'
  2. '3 large tomatoes'
  3. '5 Mushrooms'
  4. '1/2 cup spinach'
  5. '2 slices Wholemeal bread'
  6. '10g Dark chocolate'

Then looking at this list I could go 'Hmm. Maybe I could make some pizza-type contraption with some bread, cheese, mushrooms, and I can get 3 large tomatoes and blend them up into a sauce.'

Instead I'm left with vague recipes and have to click the 'x' many times to find whole foods that I can actually use. Sometimes the things in question are even takeout foods, I saw a Hardee's burger or something... they don't have that chain in my country.

Comments

  • Thanks for your feedback! We often get requests for meal ideas to be included in the Food Suggestions, but it sounds like this make a great option for users to choose whether to include meal ideas or not.

    Cheers,

    Karen Stark
    cronometer.com
    As always, any and all postings here are covered by our T&Cs:
    https://forums.cronometer.com/discussion/27/governing-terms-and-disclaimer

  • I'd like to second this request about having a whole foods selection. In addition, if there was a way to also be able to check the ability to only show foods so that you do not exceed the calories left for the day. I use the oracle to help me plan my meals so as I fill a meal out, I'd like to be able know that what is coming up as suggestions isn't going to put me way over my calorie limits for the day. Understand this may be a hard requirements issue for the developers since there are so many "moving parts" but that's what automation can really help with by eliminating high calorie options even though they may over achieve the nutrients needed. Or maybe a "high nutrient/whole food" selection where you can sort by calorie and/or nutrient density or something like that to be able to eliminate high density caloric foods from the list or move them down in the list.

  • Yes, please remove the recipes from the main oracle suggestions or at least give the option to remove them. I was amazed to discover that despite removing my own recipes, my oracle suggestions are inundated with other recipes (and not even real recipes, just recipe titles).

    All these recipes are making the oracle feature virtually useless for me, where I used to use it often.

  • Agreed. Let me go further by saying that Oracles and AI in general work a lot better if the user can give them constraints. I think the Cronometer Oracle is a terrific idea, but it's worthless for me in its current state because I am never going to eat 95% of the items it recommends. I'm transitioning to whole food Vegan, and I could really make use of a great AI advisor, but without the ability to constrain the Oracle's output, I have to pick through screen after screen of information I'm just never going to use.

  • 1000% agreed. I'm new to Cronometer this week (January 2022) and am finding both "Ask the Oracle" (on my phone) and "Suggest foods" (on the web) pretty useless at the end of the day when it comes to trying to figure out how I might be able still to meet deficient targets for the day. What I WANT is a list of whole foods, not random processed foods (like fortified breakfast cereals, processed drinks, and recipe titles). Seriously, I'm trying to find something I might actually have in the house and be able to eat WITHOUT adding a bunch of other useless (and damaging) calories to an otherwise successful day. I see people have been asking for this now for a year and a half. Any chance it'll happen?

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