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To add a food to your diary click the Add Food button on your diary page. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Alt-A (Alt-Ctl-A on Mac OS X).
Start typing in the name of the food item you want to add. For example, type 'oats'. You can enter keyword fragments separated by spaces to narrow your search. For example, typing 'soup car' will find results such as 'Carrot Soup'. You can also search by food number or barcode number. The results are ranked by a combination of how well the name matches your search, and how popular the item is.
Pressing the tab key from the search field will auto-select the top hit and take keyboard focus to the amount box. Hit tab again to take focus to the measure list, and press enter to add the serving.
Food Search Tabs
Limit your search results to find foods more quickly by selecting a food search tab.
- All: This tab shows all the search results for the text entered in the search box.
- Favorites: This tab shows all the foods you have previously marked as favorites.
- Common Foods: This tab shows results from our highest quality nutrition databases and will typically have the most nutrition information available for a particular food. To get the most nutrition information using Cronometer, we recommend searching for whole foods, and generic versions of your brand name products in this search tab.
- Supplements: This tab shows all results that match the text entered that belong to the supplements category.
- Brands: This tab displays results that are brand name products i.e. store-bought brands and common products you find on the shelves of the supermarket. These results often have fewer nutritional data because food manufacturers typically only report the nutrients required by law on the nutrition label. Foods found in this tab will often have a better alternative marked by one of our curation staff, offering a similar food with more complete nutritional data for you to add to your diary instead.
- Restaurants: This tab displays foods ordered at a restaurant. Many restaurants provide some basic energy and nutritional data for the food they serve, but like the Brands category, that data is usually limited.
- Custom: This tab displays all the custom foods and recipes that you have created as well as the custom foods and recipes that have been shared with you by other users.
More Search Options
Select the gear icon in the top right corner to expand more filters for your search:
- Source: Choose which data source you would like to get your search results from. You can learn more about our data sources in the corresponding section of our user manual.
- Category: Filter your search to include only foods from categories such as ‘Nut & Seed Products’, ‘Beverages’, ‘Fats & Oils’, etc. Please note that these categories are not to be used to ensure allergies or dietary restrictions.
- Language: Filter your search results to a specific language.
Add Food to Diary
Once you have found the food you are looking for, select it from the list. On the bottom of the Add Food To Diary window, select the serving size, quantity and Diary Group. Gold users can also choose to add a Timestamp.
In this section you can see some basic information about energy and the macronutrient breakdown. Before adding a food to your diary, you can easily see if this listing is a good source of data by looking at how many nutrients it contains and where the data is obtained from. Hover your mouse over the circle graph to view how much energy comes from each macronutrient in your food.
Better Alternatives
Some foods have a better alternative with more nutrients marked. Our curation team is hard at work identifying products in the brand database that have generic equivalents with better data. If they’ve completed the nutrition information by adding extra nutrients from lab analyzed data sources.
Added nutrients are shown in Green in the nutrition overview below:
Have a look at this Blog Post for some tips and tricks to keep in mind when choosing foods!
Favorites
If you use this food often, mark it as a favorite, so that you can easily find it in the favorites tab at a later date! To mark a food as a favorite, click the star icon that appears to the left of the food name after clicking it in the results list. That food will now appear in the Favorites tab.
To remove a food as a favorite, simply navigate back to this screen and click the star again, thus removing it from the Favorites list.
Once you have set your preferences for the food, click 'Add To Diary' to enter the serving into your diary.
Learn how to Add a Food on our Mobile App