Right,

I have 4 fields in a row

Ingred1
Ingred2
Ingred3
Ingred4

These could be for ingredients for food, let's say flour, egg, butter and milk.

When somebody submits a recipe it may look something like this:

Ingred 1 = Butter
Ingred 2 = Milk
Ingred 3 = Egg
Ingred 4 = Flour

This is all well and good, but if somebody submits a recipe like this:

Ingred 1 = Butter
Ingred 2 = Egg
Ingred 3 = Milk
Ingred 4 = Flour

It now means that Egg is in both fields Ingred 3 and 2.

I want to run a list of all the ingredients of my site off.

I could use DISTINCT but this would only show me distinct for ingred1 and not overall between the 4 different ingred field.

I would want it to just list the ingredients without repeating like:

Butter
Egg
Flour
Milk

How would I go about this?

Thanks

You have to normalise and redesign your data into 3 tables:

1) Recipe (RecipeID, RecipeName)
2) Ingredients (IngredientID, IngredientName, IngredientMeasure, etc)
3) Recipe-Ingredients. (RecipeID, IngredientID, IngredientQuantity)

You can then run your query easily.

How do I go about merging the 2 together into the 3rd table?

Check out the tutorials on arrays from php.net that can be a real help when you do php,