Sunday 13 February 2011

Breaking my own rules

Today, I am going to break my own rules. Yes, Ben, you win, I'm posting a vitriolic hate filled rant. But I need to vent some steam, because it appears that people on the internet are stupid, discourteous, often just both...

Wait, Bex, it's taken you how long to figure this out?

I'm a member (as you may or may not have guessed by my little weight loss progress button on my side there) of My Fitness Pal. It's a useful wee tool for working out how many calories you need to consume to safely loose or gain weight. It offers the ability to track how much fat, carbs, protein, fibre, vitamins etc you are consuming, as well as calories. It has, simply put, a massive database which can be added to by members of food; branded, generic, freshly picked from the ground...if it isn't in there, grab the packet and add it in yourself.

Now, not everyone feels the need to be super strictly accurate, and I have no problems with that. They'll only add the ammout of calories because that's all they're bothered about tracking, and that's fine. But what annoys me is when such a food is added to the database and then they click "Add to database for other MyFitnessPal members to use" as opposed to keeping it in their own list of food for personal use (which is a perfectly viable option)

Has it not occured to you that other people might want more than just calories? Has it ever occured to you that if you are going to add this to the database for everyone to use and not just keep it to yourself that it would be courteous to check that the information is accurate?

I mean, sure, the nutritional values of products change all the time as food producers "improve" upon their recipe's, so the values for, I dunno, cornflakes, are going to be different today to what they were five years ago. That's understandable.

But what really pisses me off is when I'm planning my meals for the week and I've bought something new at the shop. I go home, go to my food diary for monday, say "add food" and do a search for "Asda Stir Fry with Bamboo Shoots and Water Chestnuts" and see "user added on 8th Feb 2011" and I do a little jump for joy because that was just the other day and so the value will most likely be up to date and accurate...and then I open it up to add to monday's meals and see that

1) half the information is missing because whoever added it couldn't be bothered to add the whole lot (in which case, why didn't you just add it to your own database?)

and

2) whoever added this cannot tell the difference between salt and sodium

and

3) people in general can't tell the difference between milligrams and grams.

The thing is, MFP asks for the ammount of sodium because the powers that be say a healthy daily sodium intake is 2000mg. That's milligrams, not grams. There's a whole world of difference there. 3 decimal points worth. 3 whole decimal points!

But you always get on there and see that people have been lazy, and where the back of the packet says "Sodium: 1g" they translate this in the database as "Sodium: 1mg"

It's not like you can change it. It's not like there's an option to change the mg to a plain old g, and it would make it so much more simple for me if they did but it isn't, it's in miligrams. And if you do not know how to change it from g to mg, have you never heard of google??? Just search for a converter, it's not taxing. I know it takes up precious time that you could be scoffing down your salty salty snacks, but if you're going to add it to the public database, then at least do us, the public, the courtesy of giving us correct and accurate data!

So anyway, seeing that everything was clearly not in order I grabbed my packet of stir fry and checked the back to get the missing values and saw that not only was the value of sodium given as grams but...actually wait...they didn't give the sodium value in grams or otherwise...they gave the salt value.

Now, I wouldn't be so pissed off except...the packet gives the value of both salt and sodium. You can't miss it. Sodium: 0.04g (thats 40mg, by the way) and salt: 0.1g (100mg)

So why, when the value of sodium is given, have you given the ammount of salt, then published it?

I often think that people must be in a state of denial. Oh it says 0.1g, that's much less than 100...well actually it's just the same, but 0.1 looks much better on your number chart in your head. Logic seems to have vanished. But whoever added this defies that theory because now they thing their fresh vegetable mix has almost twice as much sodium as it actually does.

It's not a case of being stupid, it's not a case of not knowing "all that magical science hocus pocus about chemicals and stuff...oooooooh....." it's about frigging common sense and courtesy! It asks for sodium...give it frigging sodium, not salt! And if you thought that sodium and salt were one and the same, surely the very fact that the numbers given are wildly different is a clue that you should just type in what it tells you to. Besides, why would any food company waste their time and yours giving you the same information twice but under different names? Before we know it we'll be seeing "Protein" and "Ammino Acids" all typed up for us on the back!

As for milligrams vs grams...we may not work with milligrams in the kitchen on a day to day basis, but anyone who measures out how much milk they put on their cereal or how much fizzy pop they've drunk in anyone day to add to their food diaries (and it's a lot of people) or hell have even just needed to make yorkshire frigging puddings and needed to add water to the mix should know the difference between ml and l. So why can't you figure out that there is a difference between mg and g. You seem to know the difference between g and kg! Not differentiating between milligrams and grams is as stupid as saying to someone "oh...I weigh 100 grams...I'm so overweight" - you never would do it, because it's ridiculous! No, same rules don't apply when measuring milligrams apparently...they're oh so interchangable with their big grammy brothers...

Gah.

Anyway.

I really just needed to vent some steam because not matter how many times I post on the forums or in the "briefly describe your edits" section in the database, no one takes any bloody notice. It's not difficult. When it asks for sodium, give it sodium, when it asks for mg give it mg, when you go to post something on the public database, be courteous and post full and accurate data. Hell, even the MFP admins ask you to do so, but you ignore it. You're only fooling yourselve!

Till later folks, next time will be a much happier post!

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