Nutrients tracked

abrowning7846

add oxalates, phosphorus, and GI amounts

Redux6

The problem with this, unfortunately, is that in most places those values aren’t publicly available for individual food items.

Alatariel75

^^this. The ability to track it is of little use if the information to track isn't really available. Labels don't carry that info.

AnnPT77

I get why people want this, especially people with certain health conditions, sensitivities, or allergies. It would be great . . . if it would work. I don't think it would.

Seems like there's already a semi-even split between people who want MFP to track more nutrients, and people complaining that MFP is inaccurate because not all of the nutrient information it does track is filled in or correct/current.

The MFP database is mostly crowd-sourced, entered by regular MFP users. They only have labels to go on, pretty much, and some of them only enter the nutrients they personally care about even when there's more on the label.

There are other apps with a more centrally-curated food database. That's a tradeoff.

MFP's database has lots of stuff in it, more breadth of food items than a realistically small software company staff could enter and curate. There are accurate entries in there. That's a plus. The completeness/accuracy of those items is a minus, and so is the need to pick through seeming duplicates to find the one that's most accurate in the country where the individual user lives.

Those other apps, the ones with tighter controls over the food database, are going to tend to have fewer food products in the shared database, so users likely will need to enter foods themselves more often in their personal food lists.

That's a design tradeoff. There's literally no way to have the ideal best of both worlds, comprehensiveness plus complete and current accuracy of all possibly-wished-for nutritional details. I'm saying that as someone with a long career history in application design and data design/architecture.

If the MFP "big database, less accuracy" model doesn't work for someone, perhaps they should check out an app with the more tightly-curated model, and see if they like it better.

Redux6

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/comment/48705158#Comment_48705158

I personally use MFP for calories, but I find other nutrients on here to often be inaccurate unless I've made the entry myself.

For this reason, I use MFP solely for calorie counting, then once a day upload my food diary to an AI — usally Grok, and ask it to estimate other values that are important to me — mostly electrolytes. It's not perfect but it's pretty good for ballparking.

As AI becomes more pervasive, it's possible — if not quite likely — that future versions of MFP will include a hybrid AI system to estimate missing nutrients without the need for crowd sourcing.