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MyFitnessPal Community

Nutritional information provided by MFP reliable?

benol1

hi,

So I just uploaded a recipe from the NYT Cooking app and MFP calculates it as having 1400 calories per serve. Yet, when I look up the recipe’s nutritional information page in the app it gives me 605 calories per serving. WTF?

Does anyone else find the MFP calorie calculations way off? I would like to know your perspective!

Replies

COGypsy

MFP is a crowd sourced data base, which means that anybody can enter anything they want. Some people don’t type accurately, only enter the information they care about, get data entry fields mixed up, or I swear are just flat delusional with what they enter. Absolutely any and every entry you use should be verified by either the information on the product label, or a reliable external source like the USDA Food Data Central site. When you create recipes, it doesn’t evaluate the accuracy of the ingredient entries, it just pulls some entries, so those also need to be verified line by line as well to get accurate results.

benol1

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/comment/48628416#Comment_48628416

Thank you for the clarification. In future I’ll be a bit more attentive to the MFP paired data with ingredients when importing recipes from other sites or just key in the ingredients manually and match them with verified ingredient entries.
Again, my thanks!

Alatariel75

Yup, you definitely need to go through and check every ingredient that MFP matches when you import a recipe, it can pick entries that are wildly wrong, or even the wrong ingredient all together.

springlering62

I always verify ingredient accuracy and calories from online sites.

I very seldom find one that’s accurate, or didn’t fail to include the syrup dousing in the photos, or the “you may want extra sugar” n the photos, or the generous layer of nuts not included in the recipe, but there in the photos.

It’s maddening.

IMHO recipe sites, especially those touting “diet friendly” or “low cal”, tend to be the worst culprits. Anything to get those clicks.

Even the few MFP tecupes I’ve tried aren’t very accurate.

The onus is on you to make sure what you’re eating is what you think you’re eating.

I’ve had the best luck taking family favorites and rethinking “how can I make these more calorie efficient?”

I’ve found I can often cut sugar or butter by half, eliminate greasing pans, use an air fryer with a Misto olive oil sprayer in lieu of tablespoons of oil, and so on. I cut the calories in my pecan chicken a ton by using ground pecan meal instead of pecan chips. Get creative.

dulce_penguino

I learnt this the hard way today, trying to work out why I'd had two days worth of max recommended cholesterol in one breakfast.

It turns out that MFP rationalises 1 egg, as 1 Cup of egg. 😏

AnnPT77

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/comment/48633053#Comment_48633053

Not exactly. The food database is crowd-sourced, and many of our fellow users have put incorrect information into that database. Find and log a correct entry. The eggs I log have one-egg nutrition, not one-cup-of-eggs nutrition. If the entry you chose defaulted to a one-cup serving size, check the serving size drop-down: There may be other options you could pick even for that same database entry.

Bar coded entries aren't necessarily more accurate than any other entries. It's just what was entered by the first person - regular MFP user - who scanned that bar code. Bar codes aren't a direct pipeline to current, accurate information from the food producer.

springlering62

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/comment/48633053#Comment_48633053

when you’re adding a new food, don’t pick the first one that comes up, or even the one with the green “verified” check mark.

They can be old, outdated, or just plain entered wrong.

This morning I had a peach with breakfast. I had to scroll two pages of “peach raw usda” to make sure I was choosing one that seemed to be similar to most of them, and gave me calories based on weight rather than “peach, medium” or “peach 2 5/8” diameter”. Those kind of entries are useless imho.

Had I used one of those, surprisingly, my peach would have “cost” double the calories it weighed out at. Usually, though, it’s the other way around.

Use your native intelligence and avoid certain listings. When’s the last time you measured eggs as “1 cup”? Even liquid egg whites are tbsp on the carton (I weigh them anyway.)

ever search chocolate cake? There’s fantasy listings of 10gr per slice. Some people make drastic entry mistakes, others (I’m convinced) do it deliberately to show a doctor spouse or friends “I’m logging but not losing. This doesn’t work for me” so they can quit guilt free and move on to the next failed diet.

AnnPT77

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/comment/48633671#Comment_48633671

avoid certain listings. When’s the last time you measured eggs as “1 cup”?

Here's a thing, though: A number of of the entries whose default quantity is cups, but for which cups are dumb, are actual USDA data from MFP's initial data load at start up.

When they are, they have different types of servings in the drop-down: Weights, volumes, inch measurements, sometimes even counts (for things like nuts and berries). The data is accurate, except for a few truly weird, easily identified outliers in individual sizes within a few of those entries that are rumored to have come from a database conversion at some point in the past..

I actually prefer to find those entries. Once logged in grams, the drop-down defaults to grams in my recent/frequent foods, but all other options are still available in that one entry.

Any entry that says "USDA" in the title isn't direct from USDA. It's user-entered. The actual USDA entries from the MFP initial load are usually identifiable from the different measurement types in the drop down, often that dumb 1-cup default serving even for things where that's goofy, no manufacturer designated, and often a name/title only a bureaucrat could love ("Tomatoes, red, ripe raw, year round average", "Chicken, broiler or fryers, breast, skinless, boneless, meat only, raw").

kitchengardenplanet

I stick with the verified (checked) ingredients when entering my recipes in. The exercise calories are a crapshoot though, so I usually don’t enter them in because that will keep me to my actual max calories for the day rather than using wishy-washy calorie estimates to justify eating more. I think the bigger danger is eating out and not knowing all the ingredients or underestimating the serving size one ate, then trying to find a similar recipe to log - I’ve seen the same entree anywhere from 300 to 1000 calories. Yet another reason to cook at home :)

springlering62

I never use the drop down boxes after seeing some weird mathematical inconsistencies doing so early on when converting things via the drop down box

I look for entries that are already in the database in grams.

Maybe it was a short term glitch, but I’ve never bothered to go back and check, esp after Goodwilling all my measuring cups and spoons.

Golly, as a “Boomer” (hate that word!), I never thought I’d be all in on metric. But here we are. 🤷🏻‍♀️

lynn_glenmont

Did you check how many servings the recipe you created is for? I believe it defaults to 1, so if you didn't change it, it's including all the calories in the entire recipe in one serving.

lesdarts180

@springlering62

"Golly, as a “Boomer” (hate that word!), I never thought I’d be all in on metric. But here we are. 🤷🏻‍♀️"

You're becoming a European! Or just a citizen of the World (I know you travel a lot)