Entering sodium / salt into the food database

Finally! An answer I didn't even know to ask the question for.

jbauer83 wrote: »

thefluffyone wrote: »

Loads of people are entering the salt quantity into the sodium field and I'm getting very frustrated when told that I've massively gone over the sodium limit for the day when, in fact, it's the data that's wrong.

MFP should really consider putting a big notice next to the sodium field: "NOTE: Sodium is NOT the same as salt. Please DO NOT enter a salt value here. Divide salt quantity by 2.5 to get sodium."

Or even better, allow the user to choose whether to enter salt or sodium values and convert automatically. Software is supposed to make our lives easier, not increase our blood pressure due to bad UI/UX design!

Rant over

I’m fumin it’s now 2018, I stopped using MFP for this reason. There’s way too many inaccuracies.

This one could have been easily solved if MFP Added a SALT section instead of sodium!!!

Better to be a salt and a sodium section then the conversation from salt to sodium. This is because some countries have sodium on their nutrition label while others have salt. At least now I know why I am often over on sodium....

jbauer83 wrote: »

Well Americans and Australians cant access the uk App Store. So why not just have a salt section. Just went through my house, not a single item had a sodium figure on it. If you really insist on it. Then why not let us pick which one we want to use like you can when entering water amounts

All Australian products have sodium content (not salt) on their nutrition panels

2019 and it's still the same problem. I need to monitor my salt/sodium levels and most entries of UK foods I check are inaccurate - this really needs to change. 1g salt = 400mg sodium. Simple!

Just bumping this up again as this is still an issue. Can the developers please add a salt / sodium option for when users are inputting their data? If they put in the salt amount is should automatically convert to sodium or visa versa. As others have said, this had led to many inaccuracies of data on the database.

When I enter foods into the database I use this site for salt/sodium values....

https://www.heartfoundation.org.au/healthy-eating/food-and-nutrition/salt/sodium-and-salt-converter

mazydizzle wrote: »

Something even worse I have found is that even foods scanned via a barcode, ie unsmoked back bacon from Tesco and cathedral city cheddar cheese comes up as 0mg of sodium!!!!!

Now I realise even though I’m maintaining my calorie goals, my sodium intake is still probably way over 2300mg of sodium.

This sounds like MFP or food manufacturers can pick and choose which nutritional values to publish via the app!!

Has no one else found this to be a major issue??? It makes the daily goals completely useless and inaccurate!!

Sure it’s illegal to do this? And MFP or the food manufacturers need to sort it big time!!

Mario

This is not a conspiracy between the food manufacturers and MFP - the food database is crowd-sourced (entered by the users) so it depends on who made the entry as to how complete/accurate it will be.

mazydizzle wrote: »

ccrdragon wrote: »

This is not a conspiracy between the food manufacturers and MFP - the food database is crowd-sourced (entered by the users) so it depends on who made the entry as to how complete/accurate it will be.

But I’m talking about foods that come up using barcode scanning... I’m not talking about foods that users enter in to the MFP database.

Users have entered those foods too! I know I do when the scanned bar code is inaccurate or missing.

Oh really ok... I thought barcode scanning bought up foods MFP populated in the database

I need to take care of my sodium levels, and still the biggest problem I find with MFP is people mixing up g of salt/mg of sodium.

In the UK we don't get sodium on our packaging, just salt. The simple rule is 1 g of salt = 400 mg of sodium (well 393, but close enough). All you have to do is multiply the g of salt by 400 and that's the value you need.

Please MFP, can you do something about this? Practically every time I add some food the salt content is all over the place.

I've seen this discussion before, and it's really confusing. Fortunately, most of my day's eating don't come anywhere near the limit, so it doesn't bother me.

I’m trying My Fitness Pal, and 3 days into it I’m getting incredibly frustrated at the inaccuracy of the nutritional information - to the point where using it to track salt intake is completely useless. The majority of products in the UK seem to have people listing the salt values (such as 0.5g per 100g) rather than the sodium values. You will never get a good level of accuracy until you allow UK users to enter the salt content without having to do a salt to sodium conversion every time.

I sent a support ticket to raise the issue.

Unfortunately this isn’t the only inaccuracy - most products seem to have incorrect nutritional information. A common one seems to relate to portion size, for example where someone has entered figures per 100g but when the portion size is 50g, they’re wrong by a factor of 2. Just at a glance I’m seeing items with nutritional values that are sometimes 10x off what they should be.

Have regular users found a way around these problems or are most people simply unaware of how wrong the data is?

web2046 wrote: »

I’m trying My Fitness Pal, and 3 days into it I’m getting incredibly frustrated at the inaccuracy of the nutritional information - to the point where using it to track salt intake is completely useless. The majority of products in the UK seem to have people listing the salt values (such as 0.5g per 100g) rather than the sodium values. You will never get a good level of accuracy until you allow UK users to enter the salt content without having to do a salt to sodium conversion every time.

I sent a support ticket to raise the issue.

Unfortunately this isn’t the only inaccuracy - most products seem to have incorrect nutritional information. A common one seems to relate to portion size, for example where someone has entered figures per 100g but when the portion size is 50g, they’re wrong by a factor of 2. Just at a glance I’m seeing items with nutritional values that are sometimes 10x off what they should be.

Have regular users found a way around these problems or are most people simply unaware of how wrong the data is?

If a serving size is 100g in the food database, you can type 0.5 in the number of servings to get the nutritional information for 50g . . . or, of course, 0.38 if your amount is 38g, etc. Once you type in a particular number of servings, this information will be in your recent/frequent foods with that 0.5 servings, and come up first on search, as long as you eat that food semi-frequently. If you always eat 50g, you just click it to add. If you eat a different amount, you type in the number of servings again, and that serving size will be saved in recent/frequent.

For sodium/salt, probably the best option is to enter the food completely yourself with the correct info from labels in your country. That will be saved in your My Foods section permanently. I know that's not ideal because you'd need to do that salt/sodium conversion once for each food, but you asked other users (like me) for work-arounds.

As a point of information, MFP staff don't read all of the hundreds or thousands of posts in the Community, so requesting changes to MFP in this part of the Community is a low-payoff probability. If you would like to suggest changes to MFP, post them here, in a section MFP staff does read routinely:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/categories/feature-suggestions-and-ideas