Sweet potato and vitamin A

martinjhickey

I am told that 100gm of cooked sweet potato contains roughly 961micro frames of Beta Carotene a pre cursor to Vitamin A. I have eaten 300 gms today and MFP shows only 28% of my daily requirement consumed. I thought I was over 300% of my daily requirement. Can anyone advise please

AnnPT77

Well . . . cooked how? And which MFP database entry?

USDA Food Data Central database (https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html ), SR legacy section, estimates 11500 micrograms of beta carotene per 100g of "Sweet potato, cooked, baked in skin, flesh, without salt", but 9440 micrograms per 100g of "Sweet potato, cooked, boiled, without skin, with salt". The point isn't that one or the other of those is more correct, but that details may make a difference.

Also, most of the MFP food database is crowd-sourced, i.e., entered by regular MFP users like you or me (but maybe less meticulous than you or me, especially about micronutrients?). We don't know what source any of them used for the data. There are a lot of inaccurate entries there as a result.

You're comparing a beta carotene estimate to a vitamin A estimate besides, which complicates the question further. The USDA Health Professional fact sheet on Vitamin A (https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminA-HealthProfessional/ ) says "conversion rates may have genetic variability", but does have some rules of thumb for converting from beta carotene to retinol activity equivalents (RAE), which is the current way of setting RDAs for Vitamin A equivalents. It's complicated. There, they say the average "Sweet potato, baked in skin, 1 whole" would have 1,403 RAE, which is 156% of the daily value.

Geeky answer, eh?

Someone who's desirous of precision in micronutrients would be well served to vet any food database entry carefully before logging it the first time, to be sure it meets our needs. We can even enter our own version, which will be permanently saved in "My Foods". Any food we log gets put in our MFP recent/frequent foods, and will come up first on a subsequent search, as long as we eat that food semi-frequently.

This is all kind of complicated. A lot of people here don't worry too much about micronutrients. Personally, I try to average around the MFP goals most of the time (on a few days to a week basis), but don't fret too much about it. If there's some nutrient I'm concerned I may be low on, I spot check a couple of very typical eating days against more comprehensive sources (like that Food Central database) to rough-gauge where I am. YMMV.

I'd observe that IMU nutrition goals aren't like a magic spell that all have to be exactly exact every single day, or else evil demons will be released. Pretty good, on average over a day or few, will IMO be fine. Humans are adaptive omnivores. Our ancestors lived long enough to breed without even knowing about the existence of Vitamin A, and those who survived young childhood often had pretty long lives. We're lucky to have more information nowadays, so we can work on optimizing, but it's also possible to get a bit bogged down as a consequence. Just my opinion, though.

Best wishes!

Une_Poire

I recently noted that the app was telling me I was at single digits for vit A right after I had oatmeal with pumpkin in it. I was well above single digits in reality. I think it is possibly a glitch in the app. So I'm considering the reminder of vit A but not taking their numbers too seriously there

AnnPT77

Une_Poire wrote: »

I recently noted that the app was telling me I was at single digits for vit A right after I had oatmeal with pumpkin in it. I was well above single digits in reality. I think it is possibly a glitch in the app. So I'm considering the reminder of vit A but not taking their numbers too seriously there

More likely it was an inaccurate food database entry. There are many, many inaccurate entries in the database, because the database is crowd-sourced, entered by regular MFP users. There are a variety of ways that can happen in a crowd-sourced database like the MFP food database, not all of them intentional or careless error by the person who created that entry.

It's only a glitch in the app if the database entry represented more Vitamin A, and the app added it up wrong.

The solution, usually, is simply to choose database entries with great care about nutrients we care about, or to create our own foods in the database.

Une_Poire

AnnPT77 wrote: »

Une_Poire wrote: »

I recently noted that the app was telling me I was at single digits for vit A right after I had oatmeal with pumpkin in it. I was well above single digits in reality. I think it is possibly a glitch in the app. So I'm considering the reminder of vit A but not taking their numbers too seriously there

More likely it was an inaccurate food database entry. There are many, many inaccurate entries in the database, because the database is crowd-sourced, entered by regular MFP users. There are a variety of ways that can happen in a crowd-sourced database like the MFP food database, not all of them intentional or careless error by the person who created that entry.

It's only a glitch in the app if the database entry represented more Vitamin A, and the app added it up wrong.

The solution, usually, is simply to choose database entries with great care about nutrients we care about, or to create our own foods in the database.

Thanks, that is a good point. I usually try to use the ones with check marks, but that may not have been the case with my missing vit A, or the OP's missing vit A

AnnPT77

Une_Poire wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

Une_Poire wrote: »

I recently noted that the app was telling me I was at single digits for vit A right after I had oatmeal with pumpkin in it. I was well above single digits in reality. I think it is possibly a glitch in the app. So I'm considering the reminder of vit A but not taking their numbers too seriously there

More likely it was an inaccurate food database entry. There are many, many inaccurate entries in the database, because the database is crowd-sourced, entered by regular MFP users. There are a variety of ways that can happen in a crowd-sourced database like the MFP food database, not all of them intentional or careless error by the person who created that entry.

It's only a glitch in the app if the database entry represented more Vitamin A, and the app added it up wrong.

The solution, usually, is simply to choose database entries with great care about nutrients we care about, or to create our own foods in the database.

Thanks, that is a good point. I usually try to use the ones with check marks, but that may not have been the case with my missing vit A, or the OP's missing vit A

All the check marks mean, as I understand it, is that several other MFP users have checked a box saying that the entry is correct.

The odds of green-checked items being accurate may be slightly higher because of that, but it still depends on other users being meticulous, labels containing the desired information, the entry being current with the modern understanding/formulation of the food, and the labeling laws representing the data in the way that we might prefer.

There's an old saying from another context: "Trust, but verify."