Question about macros in mfp

luciuswillson9821

Ok mfp is telling me i have 375 cals left to eat. But my diary is saying i have 48g protein (192 cals), 78 g carbohydrates (312 cals), and 30g (270 cals) fat. For a total of 774 calories left. Why is there 399 calorie difference.

AnnPT77

Because one or more of the food database entries you logged is inaccurate or imprecise.

There will nearly always be small differences because of rounding issues. There can be slightly bigger differences because food product label regulations allow some wiggle room.

Usually, the biggest factor is because the MFP food database is largely crowd-sourced, which means entered by regular MFP users like you and me. Some of them - unfortunately - don't care as much about accuracy as you or I do, so don't enter the data fully or correctly. It can be because they only enter what they care about, or because they made a typo and didn't notice. Doesn't matter, the food entry is wrong.

If you want your macro totals to balance closely to calorie totals, it's essential to pick reasonably accurate database entries to log. In most cases, accurate entries exist for nutrition-labeled and simple foods ( thing like apples or chicken, as opposed to other people's recipes like "ham sandwich" or "meat lasagna" where we simply don't know what they put in that dish!). In the rare case where they don't exist for a simple or nutrition-labeled food, you can create them.

The recommended method is to verify food database entries the first time you use them, either against the package nutrition label, or an authoritative nutritional source such as this one:

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

Yes, that's extra work at first. But once you log an accurate food, it will stay in your MFP recent/frequent foods as long as you log it semi-frequently, and it will come up first when you go to log food.

Also, don't forget that if you consumed alcohol, the actual alcohol content of a beverage (or food flavoring agent like vanilla extract) has calories (about 7 calories per gram of alcohol) but alcohol isn't fat, carbs, or protein so won't show up in a macro column in MFP. (That's assuming the alcohol entry is accurate . . . some people allocate the calories to carbs when they enter alcohol. That's incorrect.) There's some other category for which a similar thing is true . . . sugar alcohols maybe? I can't remember for sure whether that's it, I just remember it's something that's not generally in my food choices. Usually alcohol is more relevant (quantity wise) if people consume some. Please don't take this paragraph as some kind of accusation: It isn't. I drink some alcohol sometimes. It's not health-promoting, but many people do consume some.