Separate added sugar from naturally occurring sugar?

leeflier
leeflier Posts: 1 Member
in MyFitnessPal Tech Support Questions
This might turn into more of a feature request for MFP, but when logging food I don’t want things like fresh whole fruit or dairy to count against my sugar goal. Added sugars and naturally occurring sugars are not the same thing, and unless one is diabetic there’s no reason to avoid eating fruit because of the sugar. But I do want to avoid added sugars. Is there any way currently to do this?

Best Answer

  • durden
    durden Posts: 3,592 MFP Staff
    Answer ✓
    We will definitely look into the possibility of distinguishing between sugars for a future update.

    For now, one workaround is to create a new meal category such as "fruits and vegetables" to log items containing natural sugars. When the food diary is viewed on our full website, or via our iPad app, nutrients are sub-totaled on a per-meal basis, making it possible to see your total natural sugar intake by logging the relevant items in a single meal.

Answers

  • rileyrover
    rileyrover Posts: 4 Member
    How do you create a new meal category?
  • Jean
    Jean Posts: 873 MFP Staff
    You can actually add up to six meals to your Diary. To do this on the main website:
    -Login to your account at www.myfitnesspal.com
    -Click Food
    -Click Settings
    -Type in your Meal Names
    -Save your changes

    Or you can also do this from the app:
    -Go to your Menu
    -Click Settings
    -Click Customize Meal Names
    -Add your new Meal Names
    -Save your changes
  • hguilfoy
    hguilfoy Posts: 5 Member
    This has been bouncing around for ages. ADDED SUGAR (separate from Total Sugar) is a major cause of heart disease and stroke according to the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association.

    The information is available for capture in the Android version of MFP (but not in the PC version) but the information does not appear to be stored in the database.

    Given the importance of this information to your members, I don't understand why MFP dietitians have not demanded that the information be captured, stored, and reported.
  • Alatariel75
    Alatariel75 Posts: 18,341 Member
    hguilfoy wrote: »
    This has been bouncing around for ages. ADDED SUGAR (separate from Total Sugar) is a major cause of heart disease and stroke according to the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association.

    The information is available for capture in the Android version of MFP (but not in the PC version) but the information does not appear to be stored in the database.

    Given the importance of this information to your members, I don't understand why MFP dietitians have not demanded that the information be captured, stored, and reported.

    What makes you think MFP has dieticians?
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,598 Member
    hguilfoy wrote: »
    This has been bouncing around for ages. ADDED SUGAR (separate from Total Sugar) is a major cause of heart disease and stroke according to the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association.

    The information is available for capture in the Android version of MFP (but not in the PC version) but the information does not appear to be stored in the database.

    Given the importance of this information to your members, I don't understand why MFP dietitians have not demanded that the information be captured, stored, and reported.

    The World Health Organization (WHO) says the risk with high added sugar is that it's tough to get adequate nutrition when sticking to reasonable calories, and tough to stick with reasonable calories if getting adequate nutrition. In other words, with large amounts of added sugar in the picture, we either get fat, or get sub-par nutrition, either of which are bad for health. IMU, that's the sense in which sugar is a major cause of health problems.

    (WHO also mentions increased risk of dental cavities.)

    https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/librariesprovider2/euro-health-topics/obesity/sugars-factsheet.pdf

    I agree that it would be a good feature to have MFP explicitly total up added sugars, but don't really buy the idea that it's essential.

    Realistically, for most people, the majority of added sugars come from obvious sources like candy, baked goods, sugar-sweetened drinks, sweetened cereals, granola bars, sweet condiments like jams/jellies, sweetened yogurt and that sort of thing. Those are obvious things to cut down in order to achieve better nutrition on sensible calories, and promote better health.

    Yes, there are added sugars in many highly-processed food products, but in general those amounts are small in comparison to the amounts in the types of foods I listed in the previous paragraph. Label-reading at the store, now that added sugars are on the nutrition label, is an easy way to avoid those products. (Honestly, most added sugars were kind of obvious even with the old labels, if a person read the ingredient list, despite being listed under various names depending on the type of sugar.)
    Alatariel75 wrote: »
    hguilfoy wrote: »
    This has been bouncing around for ages. ADDED SUGAR (separate from Total Sugar) is a major cause of heart disease and stroke according to the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association.

    The information is available for capture in the Android version of MFP (but not in the PC version) but the information does not appear to be stored in the database.

    Given the importance of this information to your members, I don't understand why MFP dietitians have not demanded that the information be captured, stored, and reported.

    What makes you think MFP has dieticians?

    The fact that they frequently quote them, post articles by them, or list them as expert reviewers in the MFP blogs does hint that they at least contract with some dietitians.

    See, for example:
    https://blog.myfitnesspal.com/author/emily-sullivan/ "a food data curator at MyFitnessPal"
    https://blog.myfitnesspal.com/author/joanna-gregg-rd/ ditto
    https://blog.myfitnesspal.com/author/daisy-mercer-rd/ ditto
    https://blog.myfitnesspal.com/author/brookell-white/ "now is contracted with MyFitnessPal as a Database Curator"

    I could go on, but I think PP is right: They have dietitians.

    The dietitians don't control the software, it seems. Or maybe they figure avoiding added sugar isn't that big a problem, when choosing food with reasonable care. Dunno.
  • hguilfoy
    hguilfoy Posts: 5 Member
    I posted this on 2/20/24
    The American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology attribute Added (not naturally occurring) Sugars as one of the 7 traditional risk factors linked to heart disease.

    In May 2016 the USDA required labeling of added sugar content on all packaged foods and beverages. https://www.cardiosmart.org/news/2019/5/new-sugar-labels-to-prevent-1-million-cases-of-heart-disease-and-diabetes

    As you can see tracking ADDED SUGARS is as important as tracking all sugars. Currently there is not even a way to update a database entry with ADDED SUGAR.

    With this in mind, when can we expect to be able to track this information in MFP?

    I repost my question to MFP: When can we expect to be able to track this info?

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