A Plea for accurate nutritional values (especially carbs)

adrianpaulwood
adrianpaulwood Posts: 3
edited November 12 in Food and Nutrition
I have found that nutritional values are incorrectly recorded on the myfitnesspal database - in fact around 90% of them are wrong, at least for UK foods. Its disappointing to have to keep checking and correcting them almost every time.

I think this is probably because people are misunderstanding UK and European food labelling.

On UK / Euro labels the carbs and fiber are listed separately - but total carbs needs to include both - so to get the total carbs figure for the database you have to add the amount of fiber listed to the amount of carbs listed.

In 90% of cases people are not doing that, so the total carbs is being undercounted (again, at least for UK foods).

The confusion probably arises because in the USA the nutritional labels for carbs actually include fiber; so whilst USA people can simply read the values from the label and enter that into the database, when using UK labels you MUST add the carbs and fiber together.

If you know you've got it wrong for foods you have entered previously - please could you consider correcting your mistakes? :smile:

This is important to people who are trying to track carbohydrates and fibre in addition to calories.

Can the website administrators please think about making this difference in labelling clear to people on the pages for adding nutritional values? (For example, change the heading "Total Carbs" to "Total Carbs and Fiber" and add a note to the side about how to check this in UK vs USA labels.)

Replies

  • Uaedaien
    Uaedaien Posts: 1 Member
    Bump
  • ily_em
    ily_em Posts: 8
    What on earth? I did not know that at all. I have been eating way more carbs than I thought. So for example, if I eat one of these:
    http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/things-we-make/veg-pots/mexican-sweet-potato-chilli it doesn't have 44.07g of carbs, but 44.07 + 21.45 = 65.12g???
  • yarwell
    yarwell Posts: 10,477 Member
    in general it is the "net carbs" or carbs minus fiber in the US = carbohydrates in the UK that you need to worry about. You're going to crap out the fiber not get fat on it.

    The OP is right though, as with other aspects of life this does get lost in translation. Bit like stones, fortnights and irony.
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