Tracking magnesium?

MikeMag_CT

Does anyone track their magnesium consumption in their diet? Why doesn’t MFP track this mineral among the micros?

ccrdragon

MFP doesn't track magnesium because it is not required on food labels, which makes it problematic to get amounts in foods.

neanderthin

Yeah, I'm a big advocate for magnesium and about half the population doesn't get enough of it. It's a macro mineral unlike zinc or copper which are trace minerals and we need to get around 4-500mg's a day. Magnesium is responsible for quite a few enzymatic processes, like 4-500 different processes with a big range of importance from ATP synthesis to DNA repair, so not having enough might not exactly hinder ATP production very much but it could affect many other processes downstream and DNA repair is probably something that will payoff in longevity, so yeah, I supp magnesium and have been doing it for a decade. For food, anything that is green will have chlorophyll and at the center of a chlorophyll molecule is magnesium, so leafy greens would be advisable as well as almonds and dark chocolate. Oh, and magnesium glycinate is the one I use but there are ones with citrate and carbonate, but they can give me issues with digestion and specifically loose bowel movements, so yeah, it's glycinate for me. cheers. imo.

gweppler

I’d like to advocate that MFP introduces a way to track magnesium, and other micronutrients. I’ve read that MFP only tracks the nutrients required by the FDA. Similar apps, like Cronometer, track more than the FDA requirements and I cannot imagine it would be a big lift for developers given the great foundation MFP is built on.

cmriverside

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gweppler wrote: »

I’d like to advocate that MFP introduces a way to track magnesium, and other micronutrients. I’ve read that MFP only tracks the nutrients required by the FDA. Similar apps, like Cronometer, track more than the FDA requirements and I cannot imagine it would be a big lift for developers given the great foundation MFP is built on.

Chronometer doesn't have the huge number of foods in its database. If I recall correctly, it's only whole foods and maybe some large manufacturers' foods who have their full nutrition data available. It's not really a function that could be easily implemented here. This site has hundreds of millions of food entries, but 99.99% of them are entered by the users/members like you and I. If you take the time to search out the Admin-entered food items (whole foods, from the USDA database) you WILL see Magnesium.

Alternately, you can enter your foods yourself into your personal MY FOODS list. Put the Magnesium in those. I did that with Potassium when I was tracking it. You have to vet all foods in the database before you use them anyway as so many of them are just plain wrong (because...entered by users.)

It only takes 30 seconds per food, then once you do that it's easy for you to find in your list.

The other issue here is that the developers don't really read the forums. You should post suggestions like this in the "Suggestions" subforum.

cmriverside

Just a correction on my last post, I was wrong about seeing Magesium. I thought it was there.

AnnPT77

For nutrients I'm concerned about that MFP doesn't track, I simply check a couple of typical days against other sources to see if my usual eating patterns are covering it OK, and adjust routine habits if necessary.

Others are right: With a crowd sourced database, we get a comprehensive breadth of foods, rarely need to add foods ourselves. The implication is that only the info required on food labels has a chance to be accurate.

It's a tradeoff from a data management/data architecture design standpoint. MFP chose breadth. Cronometer choose depth. Combining the two is not, in fact, easy.

Pick the one that works best for you.

kshama2001

I used to be anemic, and even though I took supplements and received iron infusions, I still checked the iron values in the MFP database. I can attest that many, if not most, of the iron values for user created entries were wrong. Some would be blank, some would have grams instead of percentages, and some would just plain be wrong.

For magnesium, I just take a supplement and call it a day.

cwolfman13

gweppler wrote: »

I’d like to advocate that MFP introduces a way to track magnesium, and other micronutrients. I’ve read that MFP only tracks the nutrients required by the FDA. Similar apps, like Cronometer, track more than the FDA requirements and I cannot imagine it would be a big lift for developers given the great foundation MFP is built on.

The reason MFP only tracks the nutrients required by the FDA is that those are the nutrients found on food labels. MFP's database is mostly crowdsourced from other uses and the information that gets entered into the database by users is largely from food labels. Cronometer on the other hand manages it's own database, which is also why it's quite small.