Calcium Amount

JackieMarie1989jgw

Hi,
I was wondering about the mfp Calcium recommendations. It just says "100" as being the full daily need, but it doesn't say what unit of measure they're using... the RDA is 1000 MG of Calcium I believe but also varies for men vs women, postmenopausal women, etc. Im realizing it might be for "100 percent" but doesnt specify what 100% is.
I have a family history of bone density problems so it's important to me.
If anyone happens to know it would be helpful, thank you!

cwolfman13

100%. MFP doesn't give Mg or Grams for micro nutrients. In general MFP is not a great place to track micronutrients as many of them aren't required on food labels which is primarily where users get the information to populate database entries. In other cases, users just populate the calories and macros when they enter something into the database. Tracking micros on MFP is a fairly futile endeavor.

AnnPT77

This is an inference, not true knowledge:

MFP generally is designed around US nutritional standards, and the database is largely (not exclusively) populated with entries that come from US food package data, because that's what MFP users are most likely to have in hand when they create a new food database entry.

Therefore, I'd expect the implied calcium amount is consistent with US packaging, mostly.

Last night, I ate a US packaged food that gave calcium amounts in both percents and mg. There is some rounding. A serving was labeled as having 140mg or 10% calcium, the whole package as 300mg, 25%. Other foods listed 30mg as 2%, 390mg as 30%, 220mg as 20%, implying 1500, 1300, 1100.

From that, I'd infer that the implied amount in mg might be 1100-1500. There's probably something on the USDA web site that says how food manufacturers are to estimate the percent (I've found similar info for other labeling questions by doing web searches), but I don't have that much patience - apologies. I know I need to get more than the RDA (because actively osteopenic), so I supplement an already-high intake.