Potassium

Janellew86
Janellew86 Posts: 43 Member
in Food and Nutrition
I've been noticing that I've only been getting half of my daily Potassium. What foods have potassium? I've been eating bananas.

Replies

  • Lietchi
    Lietchi Posts: 6,885 Member
    The food database is mostly crowdsourced, which means many entries are wrong or incomplete, especially regarding micronutrients. On top of that, a lot of micronutrients agent mentioned on food labels.
    So you are probably consuming more potassium than you think.
    For whole foods, the USDA database is a good source of info regarding micronutrients.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,617 Member
    Double check your foods in a typical day against an outside source, such as the USDA FoodData Central database:

    https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/

    MFP's food database is crowd-sourced (entered by regular MFP users like you and me), and most people rely on the food label. Some people aren't meticulous in entering micronutrient (or any!) data, so it can be wrong. Some labels don't include potassium, even when the food contains some.

    If you pick entries from the database carefully when you're getting started, you can get accurate data in the recent/frequent data that will come up first when you add to your diary. I don't have much trouble getting adequate potassium, on average over a day or few.

    Some of the foods that contribute most to my potassium intake (combo of amount & frequency I eat them) are blackstrap molasses (in my daily oatmeal), spinach, marinara, chickpea "rice", skim milk, plain nonfat Greek yogurt.

    Here is a list of some objectively high potassium foods:

    u39rs5ry1sto.jpg

    That's fromhttps://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Potassium-HealthProfessional/, where there are more foods down the list.


  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 28,052 Member
    When I was anemic I checked iron values and the vast majority of USER-created entries were missing or wrong.

    If you don't have a medical reason to watch potassium, don't bother. Or log on Chron.

    Unfortunately, the green check marks in the MFP database are used for both USER-created entries and ADMIN-created entries that MFP pulled from the USDA database. A green check mark for USER-created entries just means enough people have upvoted the entry - it is not necessarily correct.

    To find ADMIN entries for whole foods, I get the syntax from the USDA database and paste that into MFP. All ADMIN entries from the USDA will have weights as an option BUT there is a glitch whereby sometimes 1g is the option but the values are actually for 100g. This is pretty easy to spot though, as when added the calories are 100x more than is reasonable.

    https://fdc.nal.usda.gov

    Use the “SR Legacy” tab - that's what MFP used to pull in entries.

    Note: any MFP entry that includes "USDA" was USER entered.

    For packaged foods, I verify the label against what I find in MFP. (Alas, you cannot just scan with your phone and assume what you get is correct. Note: scanning is mostly only available with Premium these days.)

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