With the iphone app you can copy meals from your friends - I'll add a recipe and my wife will then copy the meal across on her phone.

thanks for the heads up and help!!!

With the smart phone app you can "steal" from your friends food diary. This is how hubby and I share recipes

iPhone iPad and Android platforms can copy from your friends diary (click wrench /spanner near calories for the meal / in the same header as the meal) but Blackberry and Windows Phone can't at this time.

Facebook has an option that allows only friends to see it or friends of friends of friends etc. mfp should limit people to these options where the true recipes can be shared as its meaningless to complete strangers who have no way of obtaining the details.

The database should only be for uploading a specific item or prepared meal (branded) and should allow the barcode to be scanned where it doesnt exist on the database and then the nutritional info to be uploaded. I have spent time uploading "new" products which have been already been uploaded by someone else (in a different format/description) where mfp did not recognise the barcode hence duplicating products and taking up valuable space on the database. Scanning the barcode should be mandatory before uploading nutritional info to avoid duplication.

But then they wouldn't be able to boast 'Get FREE access to the world's largest nutrition and calorie database — over 1 million foods!"

We don't need "Cathy's home made lasagna with ex-lax sauce" in the DB.


This might come in handy actually

I think she means when entering foods into the database, not our personal diaries.

On unique items and prepared packaged meals they would but not on recipes that people have in a book somewhere that no-one else can access or know how to get hold of. Just having a list of ingredients isnt a recipe. Recipes should only be visible to friends.

In my area, there are TONS of restaurants that don't have any nutritional information available; when I go out to eat, I just pick something in the database that sounds about right. It's an estimate. It's not going to be perfect.

Likewise, I've seen plenty of foods that do have labels in the database that have 10+ entries for the same exact food. This is because people have changed it multiple times, or the product itself has changed... sometimes it's a difference of about ten calories. I always try to choose the most accurate listing, but really, I can't imagine that ten calories is going to make much of a difference either way. *shrug*

I go for the listing that has the most info filled out because I watch so many things, but I know there are a bunch of people on here who only watch calories -- you're probably not going to convince them to fill everything else out correctly since they don't have a reason to care.

And yes, I'm one of those people who correct crap data when I find it. But that's just how I am.

I am adding it now -

1 box lasagne pasta
2 cups sauce
1 box Ex-lax
1 lbs ground beef
1 cup ricotta cheese
1 roll Charmin extra soft
1 NY Times funny pages (optional)

I had laxative lasagna at Olive Garden once. It was delicious.

^^This!!

I agree with the original poster in that some of the items are next to useless ... especially for the home made items ... as chief cook and bottle washer to 9 of us I tend to keep my recipe calculations to my self (eg my Bologna sauce contains 500g of meat but with the added holy trinity (carrot, onion & celery) will happily do 18 covers ... but not many will make it like me!)

Also ... it would be useful to select units ... I tend to cook using mass (kg and g mass) but a lot of the recipes use lb & oz and then it really get confusing when you find the right item in the data base but it's in cups or 'th's ...

Matt

You make a good point. Some sites do the conversions. Though sometimes people use volume when weight is more apropos. Sometimes here you just gotta add your chicken breast in ...cups.

Duh, but it is hurting everybody. When searching for foods in the database, the signal to noise ratio in renders it more or less unusable.

People can enter whatever nonsense they want; It just shouldn't show up in MY search results.

This. :P I have two.

Same here.

Ok.....I am disappointed I cannot find Cathy's home made lasagna with ex-lax sauce in the database!
Sad for me!
:)

If MFP would just release their "recipe database" and / or allow users of the site to copy from their friends diaries then I wouldn't "need" to enter my recipes as a new food to the database for my friends / family to log the meal I just entered.

I've noticed that when you try to find restaurant calories, a lot of time, even basic macro data is not widely available online. So I find a lot of listings with calories, but then N/A for everything else. I admit it's frustrating, but when I'm watching my macros, I usually just try to find a similar item to log instead, and adjust the portion on the entry with macros until it's close to the restaurant known calories.

I wish restaurants, especially chains were required to post full nutrition info on their websites!

PUGS haha. Are you the guy from the CAMPAIGN movie haha!

because I don't keep track of macros and am frankly too lazy to look on the package to record it. Though I do wish it was only accessible to me, so I agree on some level. But then there is also the option to edit said foods, so I guess the problem has already been addressed??
Maybe I'll be lucky enough to try Cathy's homemade lasagna with ex lax sauce some day.

Can't please everyone all the time

When you create a food you "must" actively click the option to MAKE the food item shared with others

by default that box beside that is NOT checked when creating a food. If you don't want to enter "all" the data feel free to keep it as a personal food that no one else has to see.