Entering sodium / salt into the food database

mormas
mormas Posts: 188 Member
in Food and Nutrition
UK guidelines recommend not exceeding 6g of salt per day (or 2400mg of sodium). Most UK foods list the salt, but MFP asks for the sodium values and tracks Sodium.

For those interested in tracking their salt, or those who enter items on the food database (for which I thank you), I have included the salt to sodium conversion formula below;-

Salt to sodium

To convert grams of salt to milligrams of sodium, divide the salt figure in grams by 2.5 and then multiply by 1,000 to get milligrams. So
grams of salt ÷ 2.5 = grams of sodium X 1,000

Example
6 grams of salt
6g ÷ 2.5 = 2.4g salt ... then multiplied by 1,000 = 2400 mg of sodium
So 6 g of salt equates to 2400 milligrams of sodium

Replies

  • mathildeolesen
    mathildeolesen Posts: 1 Member
    THANK YOU! I've been looking for a formula for so long. I couldn't understand how I went 7,000-10,000 over my sodium intake.. Turns out I've calculated horribly wrong :smile:
  • megemrj
    megemrj Posts: 547 Member
    edited May 2016
    Finally! An answer I didn't even know to ask the question for. :)
  • jbauer83
    jbauer83 Posts: 12 Member
    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!!!
  • Lillymoo01
    Lillymoo01 Posts: 2,865 Member
    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
    jbauer83 Posts: 12 Member
    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
  • kpsyche
    kpsyche Posts: 345 Member
    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
  • Lillymoo01
    Lillymoo01 Posts: 2,865 Member
    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

    Not a single item has salt on mine because we list sodium in Australia. This is a universal app which needs to cater for people from all corners of the world.
  • francheskafarrugia1
    francheskafarrugia1 Posts: 1 Member
    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!
  • GummiMundi
    GummiMundi Posts: 396 Member
    :o Oh my gosh, I had no idea! I've even corrected a few entries (that maybe were even correct) because where I live the nutrition tables for packaged foods only show the salt content. Now I regret having done that. :(
  • philh87
    philh87 Posts: 1 Member
    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.
  • MPDean
    MPDean Posts: 99 Member
    From my experience MFP is only accurate for calories and even then care is needed with the database entries. As an example one entry for iceberg lettuce has a greater amount of fibre than the serving size.

    In short, exercise due diligence.
  • sefajane1
    sefajane1 Posts: 322 Member
    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
    mazydizzle Posts: 5 Member
    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
  • ccrdragon
    ccrdragon Posts: 3,374 Member
    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
    mazydizzle Posts: 5 Member
    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.
  • Lillymoo01
    Lillymoo01 Posts: 2,865 Member
    edited July 2019
    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.
  • mazydizzle
    mazydizzle Posts: 5 Member
    Oh really ok... I thought barcode scanning bought up foods MFP populated in the database
  • andrewjohnson489
    andrewjohnson489 Posts: 1 Member
    Looks like the developers don’t care. Years on, there is still no salt entry and people are still entering salt into sodium making the database wildly inaccurate - at least for UK foods.
  • spaceLem
    spaceLem Posts: 3 Member
    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.
  • Strudders67
    Strudders67 Posts: 989 Member
    GummiMundi wrote: »
    :o Oh my gosh, I had no idea! I've even corrected a few entries (that maybe were even correct) because where I live the nutrition tables for packaged foods only show the salt content. Now I regret having done that. :(

    Same here. although most that I've ever corrected are where the entry says 1, 1.6 or whatever and is clearly the grams figure. However, I'd change it to 1000 or 1600 because I assumed I needed to convert grams to milligrams and had no idea sodium was calculated differently to salt. Not sure how / why I realised but I now have a calculator website saved to my favourites and use that to calculate the sodium equiv of anything I'm adding/ updating.
  • TonyB0588
    TonyB0588 Posts: 9,520 Member
    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.
  • ruchirj33
    ruchirj33 Posts: 2 Member
    Hi - can I track salt/iodine just like vitamins when I enter any food?

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