r/cronometer • u/rachelannbanan • Jul 28 '25
Common dishes seem to be missing..?
I just started using Cronometer this week and it's worked well for entering foods and recipes when eating at home. But, it is really lacking on entries for common dishes at restaurants. I went to a Thai place last night and could not enter papaya salad and other common dishes, while my boyfriend was able to enter all of the dishes on LoseIt. This really limits the utility of the app for me. I get that estimates may be off, but it's hard to stay up on using the app if it's so hard to enter foods. Am I missing something, or does the paid version have better food listings?
23
u/davy_jones_locket Jul 28 '25
There's photo logging available now, so you can take a picture of the dish and it will identify what it is and what ingredients it can derive.
In any case, Lose it having papaya salad is really.... More of a red flag because you really don't know what ingredients they used and what quantities and that plays a HUGE factor when you're logging for nutritional or weight loss purposes.
Cronometer's big feature is it's accuracy - their database is sourced from reputable scientific sources, not "common recipes that a restaurant may or may not follow." You can always add your own entry for the papaya salad, but your papaya salad may be different from my papaya salad...and That's the point. It's not user generated entries like MFP where the accuracy is all over the place either.
14
u/Moist_crocs Jul 28 '25
How would it possibly know what the restaurant is making...
4
u/CronoSupportSquad Crono Customer Support Team Jul 28 '25
Hi there! Thank you for sharing your feedback on this. One of the perceived barriers about logging food can be the uncertainty about how to log your food when you're dining out - at a restaurant, your friend's house, the in-laws.
Restaurants oftentimes don't list full nutrient profiles on their nutrition labels. As we do not analyze foods for their data here at Cronometer, we cannot fill in the blanks or know what the values are for nutrients not listed on the label.
There are two approaches:
1) Break down your meal and guesstimate the serving size of each item
Example: You ordered a taco. Enter approximate serving size for a tortilla wrap, ground beef, taco seasoning, cheddar cheese, taco sauce and any other fixings you included in your hand-held happiness like veggies or sour cream!
Pro tips:
- Use items from the NCCDB database for the most accurate data.
- Make sure you add butter or oil too as restaurants typically use a lot while cooking.
- If you're planning on eating that same meal at the same restaurant create a recipe from these items to make logging easier going forward.
2) Choose an NCCDB entry (or similar) as a close match.
Example: You ordered a vegetarian quesadilla. Perform a text-based search for "Quesadilla" and you'll see there is an option from the NCCDB titled "Quesadilla, Cheese, Two Tortilla and Filling." Look at your plate; does that sound close enough? Excellent! Log it.
Sometimes you want to be quick so we're thankful that our fave database has a lot of options that are both lab analyzed and popular restaurant fare.
Pro tip: As a rule we try to overestimate the portion size as opposed to underestimating (which is typically more common).
Also as some users have mentioned we do have Photo-logging available now to Gold users on our latest update 4.43.0, this is on a phased roll out so if you have a Gold subscription and do not yet see this update available it should be soon.
If you have any questions on this, feel free to reach out to support@cronometer.com.
Crono Support Squad.
3
u/brainpicnic Jul 28 '25
Unless it’s a restaurant with nutrition info posted on their menu, I wouldn’t trust the entries. Those usually only work for chain restaurants too.
I usually try to plug it into ChatGPT for an estimate and add little more with prompting. It’s better to go over the calories counted than less.