More micronutrients info should be included

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yukcw
yukcw Posts: 1 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Micronutrients are just equally important as the macro ones. Especially among muscle building guys, sometimes we always have chicken breasts for proteins, lack of food diversity (or just me?) Easy to forget and miss the vitamins and minerals needs.

Just discovered lack of iron during blood donation lol

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  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,170 Member
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    It can't happen on MFP, in a practical sense.

    A strength of MFP is the huge food data base. It's huge because it's crowd sourced, i.e. entered by average MFP users. Anyone and everyone can enter foods.

    Even the most conscientious users can only enter the data they know, the data on the food label. Food labels aren't legally required to include all the micronutrients, so they don't.

    Therefore, MFP can't include all the micronutrients. Can't.

    On top of that, some MFP users only enter part of the data, or enter it incorrectly. That's what humans do.

    Also, this isn't how/where to make feature suggestions. There's a specific section of the Community for that. MFP staff don't read every Community post in every section - there are too many.

    Here, you're just talking to other MFP users like me who have no more power to change the software than you do.

    🤷‍♀️
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 27,902 Member
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    yukcw wrote: »
    Micronutrients are just equally important as the macro ones. Especially among muscle building guys, sometimes we always have chicken breasts for proteins, lack of food diversity (or just me?) Easy to forget and miss the vitamins and minerals needs.

    Just discovered lack of iron during blood donation lol

    I would take this information to your doctor and see if you should supplement and have a medical issue you need to address.

    I'm anemic and don't rely on food alone to get the iron I need, but do notice that many USER-created food entries have incorrect or missing iron counts. For example, manufacturers may list iron in grams, but MFP uses percents, and I have seen when people create an entry and do bother to fill in iron, they use the gram value rather than the %, resulting in a much lower number. Often people do not bother to fill in micros at all.

    I've never noticed a problem with micros on ADMIN-created entries, so try to use these as much as possible.

    Unfortunately, the green check marks in the MFP database are used for both USER-created entries and ADMIN-created entries that MFP pulled from the USDA database. A green check mark for USER-created entries just means enough people have upvoted the entry - it is not necessarily correct.

    To find ADMIN entries for whole foods, I get the syntax from the USDA database and paste that into MFP. All ADMIN entries from the USDA will have weights as an option BUT there is a glitch whereby sometimes 1g is the option but the values are actually for 100g. This is pretty easy to spot though, as when added the calories are 100x more than is reasonable.

    https://fdc.nal.usda.gov

    Use the “SR Legacy” tab - that seems to be what MFP used to pull in entries.

    Note: any MFP entry that includes "USDA" was USER entered.

    For packaged foods, I verify the label against what I find in MFP. (Alas, you cannot just scan with your phone and assume what you get is correct.)
  • westrich20940
    westrich20940 Posts: 878 Member
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    If you are engaged in an activity (or experiencing symptoms) that is associated with needing to have specific levels of micronutrients/needing to know whether you are deficient...then MFP shouldn't be the tool you are using to track that stuff. It's not designed for that - so why complain that you can't use it for that?

    Something like Chronometer may be better, or getting micronutrients checked by a doctor and asking what foods or supplements to eat/take.

    If you are body building and eating a very narrow diet --- then yes, something to think about would be the possibility of being deficient in some micronutrients....

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