Tips for searching What's in the Foods You Eat:

• Too many results - Narrow your results by entering more keywords or more specific keywords. For example, milk finds 349 results; milk skim finds 23 results.

• Exact phrase searching - By putting double quotes around two or more words, you can search on an exact phrase.

• Too few results - One way to expand your results is by deleting keywords or choosing more generic words. For example, you will find more breakfast sandwiches with egg sandwich than with McMuffin. Another way to expand your results is by using synonyms. For example, some beverage mixes contain the word dry and others contain the word powder. If searching by description is not yielding the results you seek, you may wish to look at the food coding scheme, which provides an outline of food groups and subgroups with their food codes. Once you have found the appropriate food group, you can search by food code and browse through all the descriptions in that group.

• text strings are searched - Complete and partial words are matched to search terms. For example, the keyword cola will bring you results containing the words chocolate and capicola in addition to soft drink, cola-type. The search does not look for near matches, so spelling variations can play a role in searching.

• The more detailed the search term, the fewer the results - Singular, non-compound search words will return the most matches. For example, searching on egg finds 204 records, including descriptions that contain the words egg, eggs, eggnog, and eggplant. On the other hand, searching on eggs finds only descriptions where the plural form is used (31 records) and does not find all foods that contain egg.

• Fields searched - When you search by name or keyword, both main descriptions (Descriptions column) and additional descriptions (Includes column) are searched. When you search by number alone, only food code numbers are searched. For example, if you want to search for 2% milk, you must enter 2% rather than just 2.

• Permitted characters - What's in the Foods You Eat searches on the letters a - z, the numerals 0 - 9, and the special character % (for example, in 2% milk). Any other characters are ignored.

• Do not add parentheses or connecting words - It is not useful to add parentheses, because those characters will be ignored. If you add a connecting word (and, or, not, near) between terms, your results will be limited to descriptions containing the added text string..

• Order of search terms does not matter - Word order is not important when searching with multiple keywords (with the exception of exact phrase searching). For example, frozen yogurt will provide the same list of food descriptions as yogurt frozen.

• Search is not case-sensitive - Words (even brand names) do not need to be capitalized.