My Fitness Pal - iron levels?

[littleblueballoon]

I thought I ate a reasonably normal, balanced diet. But My Fitness Pal app frequently says that have eaten 2 - 10% of the daily recommended amount of iron.

I'm not a vegetarian. i eat a cereal every morning, which I would have thought took me above 10% anyway.

Is this right?! Do others find this?

I just checked on mine and looks like am not eating enough either? Though potatoes appear to help up the percentage.

Have a look at www.nhs.uk/Conditions/vitamins-minerals/Pages/Iron.aspx to see if there is a way of increasing it.

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Check that the nutritional info for your cereal and other high iron foods are correct, quite often when people add things to the database they only put in what they track, for example calories, carbs, fat & protein.

I agree with mrsgsr, MFP is very efficient at having calorie info but often it misses out all the other nutritional info, so I wouldn't rely on it too heavily. Do you have any health complaints that might point to low iron levels?

Thanks for your replies.

It makes sense that people only enter the nutritional information they are interested in. I hadn't thought of that.

No I don't have particular worries about my iron levels, though I often feel tired/ have headaches. But I think that is more PND and depression related. I had my iron levels checked about a year ago and it was fine.

Tiredness and headaches could also be lack of EFA's and water and calories. Often when reducing calories to lose weight we end up cutting out food that is high calorie but nutrient dense, particularly good fat dense and it starts to show in our health/mood/energy levels eventually .

EFAs?

I found that there are a lot of items on fitness pal that don't contain information on iron, so as someone said above you need to check that they do.

Essential fatty acids..."good fats"... found in raw nuts, seeds, avocado, oily fish, nut butter, cold pressed oils, olives etc