Some things to keep in mind when you add to database

jasdebi2012

Dear fellow pals,

As I am a physicist (or we can generally say a STEM person), I am somewhat shocked by some cases of wrong data I observed. Some mistakes come from conversions and others come from completely neglecting the units we see when we search for something. First of all, I understand that not everyone is an expert, and they don't have to be. The database here is user-built and that's cool, because there are millions of products out there. But, be more careful before verifying a product.

Some basic things to keep in mind when you contribute (by adding or verifying):
When your product label states 0.19g salt, it doesn't mean 0.19mg.
You have to multiply grams (g) by 1000 to get the number in milligrams (mg).
Pay attention to the units in the labels if you don't want to get crazy outputs.
Also, what we fill is sodium (Na). Salt (NaCl) is not sodium. Cl is roughly 60% of the salt and Na (sodium) is the other 40%. So, you need to divide salt in the label by 2.5 to get sodium.
So, if you read 0.75g of salt on your loved product label, it means 0.75g/2.5= 0.3g of sodium, or 300mg).

Just for transparency: from verified products, I found an error in bananas. In that case the error was not done only by the creator (which can be reasonable), but also from many people who later on upvoted the false inputs. The later part is what can be misleading, as a verified product is generally trusted and people won't look deeply into it.
Back to the banana example (to see why looking at units is important): The verified product states that you get 5%DV calcium from 100g of bananas. That is wrong, by a single google search you find that you get 5mg of calcium (~>0.5% RDA, which google's actual table translates it to 0%). The original creator must have mistaken the 5mg and put that in as a %.

Please be careful to be helpful,
Thanks

cmriverside

Yeah, well the only way you'll learn to live with this is to create your own entries to use. Once you do that they will be in your MY FOODS list for you to use.

Back in the day every item entered went into a Public database. Now that doesn't happen, but yeah - lots of wrong entries.

Since you cannot change other people - make your own entries. That is the beauty of this website.

Alternately, don't sweat the small stuff - and it's all small stuff.

mmapags

This is one of the primary reason I log on Chron these days. More verified and curated entries for better accuracy.