UK users - what do you need?
One of the projects we're working on is trying to improve the site for international users. Currently, we're focusing on the UK, so we'd like to ask our UK users - what can we do to improve the site for you? For example, for UK users, we plan on implementing the following:
- Your weight will be recorded in stones and pounds
- Height will still be in feet and inches
- Food weights will still be in grams or ounces
Please let us know if those are the measurements you prefer to use.
We'd also like to:
- Work on getting more UK foods in the database
- Modify the "New Food" form for UK users to better match the nutrition labels in the UK, i.e. change the ordering of nutrients to match UK nutrition labels, etc., so that it is easier to input UK foods
Some questions we still have are:
- What units are fluid volumes commonly measured in in the UK? Do you use fluid ounces, ml, cups, pints, etc.? And are the UK fluid ounces actually different in size from U.S. fluid ounces?
- Can anyone send us some pictures of sample nutrition labels in the UK?
- Is there anything else that UK users need that we are missing?
If you're from the UK, we'd love to get your input on how we can make the site better for you. So please let us know what you need in the comment.
By the way, we're also very interested in tailoring our site to other countries as well, so if you're from Canada, Australia, etc. and have some specific requests, feel free to let us know those as well.
Thanks, and hope you're all enjoying the site!
Weight will be easier in Stones.
Usually things like milk come in Pints.
And other drinks come in litres/ml like coke and fizzy drinks etc.
If we talk about tea we use cups.
Then also with food we have tea spoon, table spoon etc
eg. 1 teaspoon or tsp of sugar
or 1 tablespoon (tbsp)of butter
that can be easier when we are measuring smaller amounts.
If I think of anything else I will add :)
on the link there's an example of what we see on a chocolate bar in the uk, on most foods we see this kind of information, showing our guide line daily amounts and the percentages.
In certain stores we also see the weight watchers points value of certain items as this helps with people on the weight watchers diet plan.
With the exercises if you can it would be really useful to have some more examples in there. For example I tried to enter spinning the other day and it didn't have any records.
If I am honest I am not 100% sure what calories are burnt during exercise so having some built in would make it a whole lot easier.
I have nothing but praise for this site and have the app on my iPhone!
We use; ml, pints, litres, pounds, kilogrames, ounces, teaspoon, tablespoon
If you scroll down on this page, it has conversions and a list of what we use:
http://www.uk-yankee.com/wiki-manual/index.php/toolbox/conversions
We don't use the american measurement of cups over here.
I would love to also see the british equivalent for the cup measurements, as some foods are listed as cups but I don't know what that is, so it would be nice to see what the equivalent weight is when choosing a food.
Also the addition of 'ml' for measurements would be great, and the cup thing too, I don't use it currently as peoples opinion of what a 'cup' measurement actually is varies!
Apart from that the site is great!
I like that you are looking at the nutrition labels used in the UK - that should help.
I use a lot of metric - grams and ml, then if I need to, I have charts in this book that I can use to approximate.
The book I mentioned has complete charts with liquids, egg sizes, milk comparisons, dry goods, etc. It is very comprehensive with at-a-glance charts AND conversion charts with formulas. I'd be happy to give any details, just send me a message.
To get started:
1 US ounce = 29.57 ml
1 US pint = 16 US ounces = 473 ml
1 British ounce = 28.41 ml
1 British pint = 20 British ounces = 568 ml
1 US cup = 237ml
(dry) 1 US pound = 454g = 1 British pound
As an American living in the UK I also agree with dumping reference to cups - I still have a set of American measuring cups, but they aren't used here much if at all and a "cup" would be widely misinterpreted I think.
I'm really impressed with how many British foods are already in the database! It might be nice to have a few more common restaurant dishes (chain places like Nandos maybe?)
Also, these aren't particularly British-centric suggestions, but I'd love a way of tracking GI/GL totals and a facility for adding in recipes.
I'm VERY new to the site so I apologise if any of these things are already available (I've only done an initial explore so far!)
I'm happy to send in some pictures - is thre an email address to use? And are you just after a bunch of random ones or any specific products?
Thank you for the great site! I love it!
If you could make app what would help count kcal for homecooked food, it would be fantastic. Now i end up traciking piece by piece (i mean - if i could just write down weight of food and then divide by my portion size (or weight my portion and it would calculate kcal)
Also I want to be able to easily create my own dinner recipe and use that for my food. Things I have a lot like veg soup or fish pie etc. They have a good one on weightlossresources.co.uk and thats a good format to follow.
love the site, it is a godsend i am so grateful...I hope it remains free, I am on limited income so its lovely for me.
Would love the full nutritional breakdown available on the iphone app to be available on the website too...
good idea with the nutritional info order - as does make it difficult to enter new foods.
One thing I noticed is that if someone as entered a food - but not all of the info available you can't overwrite it or edit it to contain more info...such as sodium or fat etc....
Oh and def agree that food I have for lunches/snacks should appear in the dinners/breakfasts sections too - they shouldn't all just be one meal or another.
Oh and def agree that food I have for lunches/snacks should appear in the dinners/breakfasts sections too - they shouldn't all just be one meal or another.
Totally agree!
Like everybody else, stones and lbs would be fabbbbby. I get confused with just lbs. lol.
Looooooooooooove the site otherwise.
X
Mike what kind of nutrition labels are you looking for?
PS:Meant 'Site' in my previous comment.
The sodium thing is the biggest issue. measuring it as salt would be easier. and the fact that sodium is the only major mg measure means people ALWAYS enter it wrong! lost count of how many things i've updated correctly!
Great site tho, and really works!
- stones/lbs AND kilos for weight would be ideal.
- fluid ounces are the same in both countries
- UK pints are larger than US pints. UK is 568ml, US is 473ml
- UK recipes do not use cups for any measurements, we don't have cups and 1/2 cups and 1/4 cup etc. measuring tools in our homes.
- UK measures in ml, pints/fluid ounces, grams, kg, mg, ounces (dry good)
- UK nutrition labels will generally have figures for 100g and one serving (# of grams varies)
- UK nutrition labels measure the following contents:
Energy in Calories, Carbohydrates total and split into sugars and starch, Fat and saturated fat, Fibre, Sodium. SOme labels will also have: Vitamins B1, B2, Niacin, B8, Folic Acid, B12 and Iron in mg and % of RDA
- A notation of either grams (for solids) or ml (for liquids) next to all of the US cup measurements would be tremendously helpful.
I will gladly send you some photos but don't know how or where to upload them. Can I email them to you?
I am English but have lived in the US for many years so know both sides of these tricky measurements. Feel free to contact me if I can be of any further assistance.
Meokk
Also would be good to add more UK supermarket chains and chain restaurants like Pizza Express, Nandos, Zizzi GBK etc
otherwise, I'm really happy with the site!
What IS a cup of water comparable to?
Stones and lbs - definately a good idea for weighing us.
Even though we are SUPPOSED to be metric - lbs and ozs for weighing food would be helpful.
Great app and really pleased to hear you are concentrating on the UK market.
I have uploaded some sample nutrional labels here: http://bit.ly/9qgTd3
You should probably also visit the food standards agency who control this sort of thing in the uk. There web site is here: http://www.food.gov.uk/foodlabelling/
Another approach which could be useful for you to understand the uk market it to take a look at the leading uk diet site http://tescodiets.com - I found their site frustrating and slow, and there is no mobile app, but the database of foods and recipes they have is excellent.
If you would like more pictures or any more info let me know
Cheers
Ian
I agree with everything else that has been said. It would be nice to have a few more UK foods on too. I find you have quite a few things from Tesco which is good, too.
It's always important to remember that eating out serving sizes in the US are about 2x as big as those in the Ireland.
I find using cups, half cups, etc is a very subjective measurment and I'd rather weigh things anyway to be more exact so having weights (mass) would be good as well as volume!
You're doing a great job!
otherwise amazing site and app! thanks!
I use this site to plan my shopping lists. Very useful as it shows the Nutrition labels.
http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk
May I contribute - I'm from South Africa which is a 100% metric country.
First - I'd feel slightly less rejected if it were possible to choose South Africa as a country when you sign up.
Secondly - answers to your questions for us
Fluid volumes in millilitres
Often "weight volumes" are given in millilitres too - easy to measure
out with a measuring jug
We don't generally have nutrition labels (!)
We don't use half, quarter, eights etc - we would just use decimal fractions (1.5 kilograms)
Mass: grammes or kilogrammes (1000g)
Volume: millilitres or litres (1000ml)
My impression is that behind the scenes the site is converting back and forth to imperial - I see my kilograms etc that I enter becomes strangely slightly different when they are shown back to me.
I also see pounds bleeding out even though I'm set to metric - like on the weight loss "badges".
Nice site, thanks!
Also i completely agree that using grams not cups would help loads, I tend to guess how much of a cup i use for recipies! Iphone app is AWESOME though!
Would it be possible to have limited values for amounts? i.e. a user adding a new food to the database has to choose cups or grams or whatever, have all the possible choices on the database. But then allow subsequent users who wish to record their intake to enter in whatever measure is local to them and have the database work out the conversion?
I know that must be possible although I imagine it would be a bugger to write that code for the first time. But once done, it's done!
We tend to use teaspoons, table spoons and then grams/ounces for larger amounts.
Cups -> ounces -> grams etc
Also, in the UK - we have an exercise class called body pump - which is not circuits it is more like body conditioning - could we work with you to get the calories registered correctly
I don't find the lbs an issue as it's very simple to work out.
I'd like a filter on the search facility so somehow only the UK foods would be shown.
I quite often batch cook, which can cause a bit of faffing when creating a meal. I have to add all the ingredients to the diary, then select the 'add meal', then add half or quarter of the portion to my dinner...and then go back to delete all the other ingredients (if that makes sense?!) and it can be really time-consuming.
So, I'd like the option to create a meal directly from the ingredients in the database without first adding them to the diary, allowing me to 'build' a meal, then add my portion to my food diary.
That's all for now, but will keep thinking! Thanks for a fab site.
Thank you!
Oh and you have starbucks on there but it would be really useful if you could make each size of each drink available
Other than that i think you guys are doing an ace job! Absolutely love it and your iPhone app is perfect too! Out of all the sites/apps i've tried this is by far the best!!
Lots of loves <3 <3 <3
The only problem that I did find was about the sodium. In the UK it is listed as grams not milligrams and I found that when people entered their foods they would not convert it correctly. I gave up on watching my sodium intake on this site because of that problem.
I really like your idea to change the food entering form to match the UK labels. Over here we tend to have it in this order:
energy kJ and kcal
protein
carbohydrate
sugars
fat
saturated fat
fibre
sodium
salt
We rarely have cholesterol or other fat types listed.
Thanks for listening to comments and keep up the exceptional work. Thankyou.
And my other problem is with my morning tea with semi skimmed milk. They come out at 130 calories per cup whereas a cup of semiskimmed milk on its own comes out at 122! So the tea is 99% water plus 1% semiskimmed milk, but yet clocks in with many more calories. This pushes all Brits out of their targets!
Like 160g of chicken or 3oz of banana or whatever... because sometimes (if you're using up leftovers for example), it's not a precise serving...
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