Are the fitbit nutrition data accurate?

[Philoutw]

Hi,

Logging food really helps me to understand and cut the carbs. However, I found out that many nutrition data on the fitbit database look sometimes incorrect or inaccurate. It ends up to change the total number of carbs or calories quite a lot qt the end of the day depending what you use as data.

For example:

Strawberry/strawberries                                     Amount          Cals     Fat       Fiber   Carbs  

Wikipedia       Strawberry                                  100 grams       33        0          2          7.68    

(fibit data base)Strawberry/Strawberries           100 grams       71        0.5       3.3       18.7  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry

I know there are of course some variations regarding the fruit and how much ripped the fruit is. But that much?

Thanks.

Philippe

[Ukase]

You ask a good question. I wish I had an answer that you could "take to the bank". Unfortunately, the calorie information available at any website is dated and likely inaccurate. If I remember, most of the information stems from something called "The Atwater System". 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-food-manufacturers/

You can read about it if you follow the link. 

Ultimately, we will never definitively know how many calories are actually in a product. We can get close, but we'll never know because of a vast number of variables. 

Take a chicken patty for example: 

Don Lee Farms Chicken patty from Costco - 130 calories. 

Well, suppose a given chicken had a better diet? Maybe that chicken meat would provide more calories due to superior nutrition. Maybe it's really 135 calories. Or 150 calories. 

Maybe a strawberry in a field had better quality water, or more irrigation than another strawberry. Or, one bushel of strawberries was picked from a given field in Baldwin County, Alabama and the soil there is richer in nutrients than a similar field in Georgia. And - some strawberries are bigger than a golf ball, while some are the size of a big marble. Each one will have a different caloric value. (This is why I weigh all my food instead of using volume to determine calories.) 

So, yeah, I get it about the accuracy of information, or lack thereof. I just haven't figure out anything to do about it, other than keep tabs on my results as a I go to see if there is something in my diet that may be swinging my weight to the wrong side of the scale. 

[A_Lurker]

@Philoutw - which entry are you using for strawberries?  I just logged 100g of strawberries, raw and it gave me 32 calories, which is pretty much the same.  Frozen, unsweetened, thawed (1 cup) gave me 77 calories, which if you click on the food entry itself was 221g.

[SunsetRunner]

"Some" entries are so far out in left field it is not even funny, but what I do if an "official" entry is badly incorrect is just to make my own custom entry based on current nutritional data.  Problem soved. 😉

[augcott]

I'm also noticing that quite a few barcodes scan with inaccurate nutritional values.  Sometimes the  cholesterol values are way off.   Sometimes it's the carbs or various other values.  I've realized that I really have to pay attention when scanning and probably should just input the food as "custom" with the information that is on the label.  
Is there a way to "correct" Fitbit's information?