fortified American food data - for Europeans, all crono data is false! (e.g. bread)

Lolinda

in America many foods are fortified by law. For example bread is. in Europe it is not ( I can definitely vouch for Germany, Hungary and Switzerland).
-> tenthousande of European users will have all the nutritional analysis with cronometer completely wrong and valueless.

Dear developers of cronometer, I kindly invite you to address this problem.

while the problem is obvious, here is some example data, what a grave error we are talking about:
wheat bread (free German official database):
https://www.ernaehrung.de/lebensmittel/de/B311000/Weissbrot-Weizenbrot.php
example: vitamin B1: 0.09 mg / 100g

Cronometer:
Wheat Bread
Food #450733, Data Source: NCCDB
example: vitamin B1: 0.41 mg / 100g

my only explanation for this dramatic difference is that chronometer bread must be fortified, without saying this.

I wonder why nobody is talking about this on the Crono forum. this is a dramatic error!! this renders nutritional analysis by almost all Europeans entirely valueless (barring very low carb dieters, and barring researchers who are aware of the difference and import free German food data). Tenthousands of European users of Crono must think that their vitamin intake is okay when it may be absolutely not.

(Ps: just a side remark in case you wonder how it is possible that Europeans did not go extinct :-) it is simply that American-style white bread (= toast bread) is widely considered junk food in Europe, and educated people or health conscious people would not likely eat it. Here, bread is normally bought not at a supermarket in a plastic bag but in a bakery, made of real grains, with some of the bran (or even all) milled into the flour. having said these, people who do eat white junk food bread in Europe, are much worse off nutritionally.)

p0wer_lifter

@Lolinda ”American-style white bread (= toast bread) is widely considered junk food in Europe”

And quite a few of us Americans, as well :)

AndrewR

Good finding! - Fellow European here, just today I bought some sesame seeds and happily identified them because they had various entries for hulled/unhulled and fortified and not fortified. Disappointed they get something as basic as an everyday bread wrong by assuming straight up it is fortified. That's messed up!

jefmcg

Apparently the USDA MyPlate (successor rt of the food pyramid) only recommends that half your grain intake is whole grain. That is because the diet is so poorly designed that if you didn't eat a considerable amount of the fortified grains, you would be deficient in several nutrients, and they only fortify the refined grains.

https://www.myplate.gov/eat-healthy/grains

But they can assume white bread is fortified because those databases were written for Americans, and white flour is almost universally fortified in the USA.

AndrewR

@jefmcg - I understand. However, Cronometer's clients are not limited to the USA and would be nice to have various entries to cover different needs. Even in the north American regions, are all white bread's fortified?

p0wer_lifter

So, this isn’t a bug with Cronometer, but a limitation of the databases being used to populate the food lists.

Is there a database that covers these European white breads? Cronometer would need to tie into a data source that has these items.

Alternatively, if there’s data on individual items, then you could create a custom food for it, but surely there’s some data source out there that Cronometer may be able to use.

jefmcg

You can see all the data sources here. I'd suggest looking at the Dutch and Australian databases, as both countries seem to have good bread. Unfortunately UK and Ireland bread is usually made via the Chorleywood process resulting in nonsense ingredient lists like this

INGREDIENTS: Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Calcium Carbonate, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Water, Yeast, Salt, Soya Flour, Preservative (Calcium Propionate), Emulsifier (Mono- and Di-Acetyl Tartaric Acid Esters of Mono- and Di-Glycerides of Fatty Acids, Mono- and Di-Glycerides of Fatty Acids), Flour Treatment Agent (Ascorbic Acid).