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Carbs in augergine parmigiana recipe on Diabetes UK website

Leadinglights said:
I hope you don't think we were being too critical but it is worth having a reality check if something doesn't seem sensible.
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Not at all. I worked for years as a test engineer so my natural instinct is to look for problems. The devil, as they say, is in the detail…
 
littlevoice359 said:
I’m pretty sure the API I am using is US-based and I have a plan to deal with that. Using this recipe as a test has been particularly useful because it highlights the error in the aubergine carbs (and weight) estimations. Absent of such a glaring error I might not have seen the magnitude of the problem.

As it happens, I was actually more interested in the natural language processing aspects of the API and, for that reason I see some definite positives from this exercise. Enough that I am going to move forward. With luck I will have something useful in a few days.
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Changes were easier than expected. Repeating the analysis after updating the app gives numbers that are in line with those on the recipe site. 77g carbs total, so 19.25g per serving.

See below/attached for detailed breakdown.
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@littlevoice359 Good that you have the carbs sorted for your app. Interesting that your aubergine info now shows that it contains zero fibre which I am pretty sure is wrong, so it may need a bit more tweaking or simply don't bother with reporting fibre. Do you really need to know all these different parameters just for personal use?
 
rebrascora said:
@littlevoice359 Good that you have the carbs sorted for your app. Interesting that your aubergine info now shows that it contains zero fibre which I am pretty sure is wrong, so it may need a bit more tweaking or simply don't bother with reporting fibre. Do you really need to know all these different parameters just for personal use?
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Cheers. I don’t use aubergine as a rule so my ingredients database table had errors I had not noticed.

As to needing all this info, I rarely look at anything other than carbs and calories. The rest are there for completeness. I am a software developer at heart so much of the value in my web app is for my personal amusement and to keep my skills current.
 
Still interested in the apparent precision in the numbers and wonder if there is any way to reflect that in the outcomes.

I keep going back to when I first got to thinking about carbohydrates and one very early question I asked was --- how are they measured. My digging around suggested they were not! It seemed to me that what happens is that all the the things that can be measured are measured and what is left is called carbohydrate. I could not figure out how fibre was separated from "carbohydrate" or how "sugars" which are a carbohydrate were separated out. I also found that in the packaging regulations there is no requirement to measure anything. Estimates were all that is required to produce the label on the packet. i also found that you could find quite different numbers for what you might think were the same thing, especially when it came to fruit and veg.

I have mused before on the carbohydrate content of the humble spud. Go to any source and you will get a number. Go to several sources and you will get several numbers. If you try and find out if different varieties have different carb contents, of if new spuds are different to old, or how carb levels are affected by cooking method or anything else then it goes quiet.

I am not decrying the labeling or those who work to produce labels which are helpful being based an numbers rather than "traffic lights". I would just like to see an honest opinion on the likely error in any assumed value. Is there any way you could build that into your system?
 
Yes, I was aware it was a "hobby" for you but just thought I had better mention it in case it wasn't just aubergine the glitch had an impact elsewhere in your system. I really don't understand programming but I do know more about food and once attention had been drawn to the error in your table for carbs, it was a glaringly obvious omission in your revised data for me.
 
The aubergine number still seems high - it is in my book as safe to eat and having eaten them and tested my BG levels after the meals, even 5% could be a bit high.
 
I have just spent an amusing half hour taking nutritional information about aubergines from a dozen or so web sites and stuffing them in a spreadsheet. Makes a change from taking aubergines and stuffing them with whatever is on trend these days.

I found you can get anything from 2g to 9g per 100g as the carb level for an aubergine. I am sure that if I had the inclination to dig deeper I would have found that some of that variation would have been due to whether or not sugar and fiber or fibre was or was not included in the carbohydrate figure. One was really confusing where it gave grams of carbohydrate in a cup of aubergine - yes it was an American site.

I also was beginning to develop the notion that if you were dogged enough you could probably trace the base data back to one or two sources with each web site quoting variations and interpretations of that data.

So @littlevoice359 - suggest you take care where your API is getting its data from. The old adage, garbage in, garbage out, still stands!
 
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