Confusing Sodium Measurement Units on MFP?

blackcoffeeandcherrypie
blackcoffeeandcherrypie Posts: 486 Member
in Food and Nutrition
I recently started tracking my sodium, thinking it couldn't hurt to improve that aspect of my diet and I've discovered that a great many of the foods listed on MFP have the sodium incorrectly entered.

Imo, this is because MFP chooses to list it by MGs, whereas food (in the UK at least) contains the sodium in Gs. This seems to have led to many cases where food contains, for example, 1g of sodium, and this has been entered onto MFP as 1mg of sodium, instead of the 1000mg which should have been entered! Quite a difference if you are trying to watch your sodium intake.

So this is a post to a) warn others who are monitoring their sodium to double check the food labels with the amounts recorded on MFP and b) a request to change the MFP measurement unit, as this may reduce mistakes and make entering nutritional info easier.

What are your thoughts?

El :-)

Replies

  • curtnrod
    curtnrod Posts: 223 Member
    Many foods are entered manually by members from recipes and indirect sources. When you choose a food to add, check the nutrition info and there is an option to confirm its accuracy. If it gets enough inaccurate votes they remove it from the database.

    I add my foods by scanning the package bar code with the scan option on the MFP phone app whenever possible. It helps improve the accuracy of the database and my intake amounts.
  • iLoveMyPitbull1225
    iLoveMyPitbull1225 Posts: 1,690 Member
    alot of things are wrong, unfortunately. the users have the ability to enter recipes and nutritional information. Its like wikipedia, gotta be careful what you believe.
  • wellbert
    wellbert Posts: 3,924 Member
    Yeah... There are a lot of people entering food into the public database that shouldn't be. Sometimes 3, 5, 10 copies of a food and not a single one right!

    My favorite example is a slice of wheat bread with supposedly 40 grams of protein. And MANY people voted accurate!

    dumdedumdum.
  • jaihyunee
    jaihyunee Posts: 1
    i found that all the sodium units are wrong as they were all in grams, not mgs. Its annoying that i cant change the errors. I eventually have to input everything again because of the sodium unit!!
  • JCulpan
    JCulpan Posts: 7 Member
    I agree, I suspect that many errors are because some people do not notice if the food lists sol/sodium in mg or g. this does have a very significant impact on monitoring sodium on this site.

    I think MFP should change the units listed to grams, and include the unit of measurement on the list.
    regards
    Jane

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