Caloried

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Jaline1984
Jaline1984 Posts: 1 Member
in Getting Started
Hi. I'm new and need some help. When I add food the calories on the package differs per 100gram from the app tracker. Which one is correct.

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  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,389 Member
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    The one on the package. Use a different entry. and if you don't find one you can enter your own on the website. This is a user-sourced database mostly. Some product information might be outdated, some for other countries, some simply wrong.
  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 7,447 Member
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    This^^^^

    Food entries are crowd sourced, meaning entered by other users. Manufacturers generally don’t enter their data. Some products change, too, either through retesting or ingredient changes.

    The day my beloved chicken sausages went from 70 to 120 apiece was a black day indeed.

    Similar products can vary from brand to brand. Lidl cottage cheese is 60 per serving. Daisy is 90. (Which btw led to a bit of a falling out in our house when husband went to a different store than instructed to shop and came home with higher calorie products. He didn’t know this.)

    Also, be mindful of entries. If you see a meal or dessert listed for unrealistic calories, someone entered a fantasy food to try to (un)pad their food diary. It happens. A LOT.

    I saw a well know fast food value meal listed yesterday for 130 calories- we’re talking large fries, main course, soda . How many people carelessly or innocently use that as their default entry and then wonder why they can’t lose weight?

  • Cheesy567
    Cheesy567 Posts: 1,186 Member
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    Well… sometimes the labels are wrong, too. I’ve seen it more than once with serving size type ounce to gram conversions are just plain wrong.

    The weights of food in the packaging can be far off, too, for instance the variance between tortillas or slices of bread or bagels can be pretty big if you’re trying to be precise.

    The entry in the MFP database might be for the cooked version of meat vs the raw version, too… food loses a lot of liquid weight when cooking and those measurements are very different.

    If you have reason to question the packaging label, or the food doesn’t have a package or label, you can go to the USDA database and search for the exact food there. You can copy and paste that syntax of the entry into the MFP database to find the exact entry too, the entire USDA database is within the MFP database. I keep this bookmarked, use it a lot to find the correct fruit, veggie, or meat.

    https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/index.html
  • MaryJane_8810002
    MaryJane_8810002 Posts: 2,082 Member
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    The package has the correct calories. Sometimes people enter the wrong amount (I.e. entering 100g calories for 30g of food) or the package can vary(I.e. McDonald’s medium French fries are different calories in several countries). Hope this helps.
  • westrich20940
    westrich20940 Posts: 876 Member
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    Use the label amount - BUT know that those are also sometimes incorrect. The databased in MFP is crowd sourced, so often is also incorrect. Simply do the best you can.

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