Nutritional Totals Inaccurate

[tdcallahan]

Has anyone else reported or noticed that nutritional totals on the food log are inaccurate? For example, this morning I had one food that provided 82% RDA and another one that provided 29%. My running total for the day should be 111% yet the running total so far according to FitDay is 91%. This is just an example but is a daily occurrence. This is my first post so perhaps this has been brought up but does anyone have a suggestion or solution other than to compute everything manually? That would seem to defeat the purpose of using this site.

[RunbikeSki]

hmmm, not sure what's going on tdcallahan. Was the RDA info for each of the foods individually from FitDay, or did you read it off of the package? Also, is it possible that you entered less than a full serving for one food or the other, thus lowering the total amount consumed.

Maybe if you can provide a little more information, we can suss out the problem.

It is, of course, possible that the error is FitDay's. If that is the case, we need to figure out where in the depths of the program the error is coming from. (BTW, it isn't me that actually know anything about the details program - but I can pass along issues to the wonderkind that put it all together )

[liser950003]

I just posted the same problem, but apparantly in the wrong area! I had RDAs of 0, 0 and 50% that add up to 130%. They are all items from the database, I have added nothing custom. I checked for other micros and they didn't add up either.

[IBswilson]

We can fix foods with inaccurate data or look further into the problem if it's an error in calculation.

Screenshots or more specific examples would be very helpful.

[zeelona]

Here is a specific example: I added 250 grams of papaya with RDA of vitamin A showing 55%. Then ran a nutrition report for the day and is showing RDA total for vitamin A of 15% only. I had vit.A at zero before entering the papaya. Program does similar things for other foods as well, it looks like it's using a different database for the reports.

[IBswilson]

I have an answer for the provided example:

Fitday's nutrition label is based on DV (to match all nutrition labels).
FitDay's total nutrition is based on RDA.

• Vit A %DV = 5,000 IU
• Vit A RDA = 700 mcg

250 grams of "Papaya, Raw" contains:

• 2,735 IU of Vit A - about 55% %DV
• 137.5 mcg of Vit A - about 20% RDA

FitDay could make this more obvious. I'll see if we can add some text to the nutrition labels to make it more clear that those calculations are based on DV.

[zeelona]

couldn't you just use the same methodology for labels and reports? That would be really helpful. I think a lot of people are using the site to track the nutrition and that would eliminate the confusion (I see plenty of posts about that). But thanks anyway for explaining

[IBswilson]

The USDA uses %DV for nutrition labels which is an incomplete nutrient list*. RDA is an older but more complete list. We have to use %DV for the nutrition labels to make it easy to copy a nutrition label into FitDay but those labels do not go into the level of detail that RDA does with macronutrients.

* At the time FitDay was first developed. This may no longer be true. I'd have to do some research as I do not know enough about this myself.