Vitamin K Tracking

photoscott13

This app is amazing at tracking all sorts of health aspects. Extremely easy to search and add food items. It woukd be AMAZING if you could add Vitamin K to the nutrition tracking or monitoring. Those of us on Warfarin, a blood thinning medicine, need to monitor our daily Vitamin K intake EXTREMELY CLOSE, as too much or too little could be deadly. It seems this database is robust enough to handle such an addition. This small addition to the nutritional info in the daily diary could literally save lives. Being able to set your Vitamin K daily goal like we do for Sugar, Carbs, etc, and monitoring as we add our food throughout the day would be an absolute game changer. The few apps out there for Vitamin K are so bad they aren’t even worth using. PLEASE add Vitamin K to the nutritional info. You will be saving lives. Mine included.

Lietchi

The database is probably robust enough, but I think there is a different issue: where would the numbers come from? I don't think vitamin K is part of the mandatory nutritional info, so even if the field were created, it would probably be empty for most foods for lack of info?

Cheesy567

People who need it could enter foods themselves from the USDA database. Simply having the space available would help. I had to track vitamin K for years and often thought that it’d be nice if MFP would help.

Or, MFP could re-enter a subset of USDA database entries specially marked that include micronutrients, too. People have asked for things like vitamin K, accurate magnesium, iron in mg not %, etc. These and many more are included in the USDA database. It would take care of many of the inaccuracy issues, also, to have a readily available reliably accurate subset to search.

cwolfman13

The issue here is that the database is crowdsourced from other users and the primary source of the nutritional information users enter is from packaging. There are numerous vitamins and minerals and other micro-nutrients that aren't required by the FDA to be listed on nutrition labels (vitamin K being one of them). Basically there is no way for users to enter that information as it does not exist on the packaging they are using.

The other issue with crowdsourcing a database is that it leaves a lot of room for error, even with things that are listed on nutritional labels...either carelessness of a user or fat fingering something or even just omitting something when they make an entry because it is non-pertinent to them. MFP is pretty good for tracking calories and macros...tracking micro nutrition with MFP is a fools errand. You might want to look into something like Cronometer...I've heard they drill down into more micro-nutrition and their entries aren't crowdsourced, but I've never tried it.

Nova

We're definitely considering adding native support for tracking additional vitamins (such as Vitamins D and K), as well as supplements, or medications. In the meantime, many users use the Notes area to record these additional items.

As an alternative, you can create a new Meal category called "Vitamins and Supplements". You can then create a custom food entry in the food database to represent your vitamin or supplement, and log this item to your diary when you consume it.