Nutrition search bar

Learn how to use the nutrition search bar.

The nutrition search bar is the main way in which you can add foods to recipes, meal plans, and meal presets in Mealplana.

The search bar is a simple search box as shown below where you can type food names and keywords.

To use it properly and ensure you find the items you need, please follow these steps.

Step 1: Type the name of the food you are searching for, i.e. banana. As you type, multiple databases are queried and the results are shown.

The results include multiple items that contain your keywords. Keywords will be highlighted in bold text, so, for instance, you can see how the keyword Banana is highlighted in this search.

On the right hand side, you will see a summary of different properties for each food item, including:

• Energy per 100g of the food item, in KCal
• Macronutrients distribution as a percentage of energy. Yellow are Carbs, Green is Fat, and Blue is Protein.
• Which database the item is coming from, including USDA (American products), AUSNUT (Australian and New Zealand), UK (British), MYFOOD (for custom foods you have created yourself), and BRANDED (for branded products).

You can navigate the list with your mouse/trackpad, or you can do it using your keyboard. When you are ready to add an item, you can click with your mouse/trackpad, or press ENTER in your keyboard.

Refining your search

If you search for a simple keyword, such as banana, or chicken, you will match hundreds or even thousands of items in the database. If you want to find something more specific, it's best to include more keywords in your search.

For instance, below are the results for chicken thigh raw.

As you can see, results are sorted by relevance and the top result is likely the one a user querying chicken thigh raw would want.

When searching for products, try to include keywords such as:

• raw
• cooked
• uncooked
• dry
• fresh
• frozen
• flesh
• canned
• jarred

You can also include specific cuts for meat (e.g. rib-eye, loin, chuck), or specific parts of a given food (e.g. broccoli stem, broccoli florets, broccoli leaves).

The more specific you are the better odds of finding what you are looking for quickly. You can glance at the calories and macros distribution for a given result to guess if the food you have found is what you meant.

For example, when searching for chicken thigh in the example above, you can see that the first result includes a combination of protein and fat mainly, since it's referring to the flesh. However, the second result is skin only, which is predominantly fat in content.