#61 Salt and/or Sodium

[Anonymous]

Hello, can I start by thanking you for a great program. As a heart patient I can tell you that it is really, really useful and I will be recommending Cron-O-Meter very highly to my fellow patients.

I wonder if I could ask for a little interface improvement that may help save a few lives.

Would it be possible to include salt or sodium in the General tab in the "Create new food" section.

I know that sodium is a mineral but it is also one of the biggest killers and has been heavily linked with heart disease, stroke and diabetes to name but a few.

Here in the UK, the RDA for salt is currently 6g but many researchers and medical people are already saying that is too high.

Also, food labels generally show sodium content but sometimes show salt content instead, probably just to confuse the public.

It's easy to work out the equivalent amount of salt, though. Just multiply the sodium value by 2.5 (eg 1.2g sodium is equivalent to 3.0g salt).

Maybe you could put Salt in the General tab and have the program automatically insert the equivalent Sodium value in the Minerals section.

Likewise, when a user inserts a value for Sodium in the minerals section, perhaps the program could automatically insert the Salt equivalent in the General tab.

Also, would it be possible to have salt or sodium intake as part of the bar graph on the summary page?

Finally, as food labels sometimes show content in grams and sometimes in milligrams or suchlike, would it be possible for the user to choose which unit of measurement they use for each nutrient they are entering in the food editor?

Many thanks,

Tony