Cronometer: Calcium Aborption values helpful or misleading?

Posted by suehall @suehall, Aug 27 7:50am

I got a month's subscription to Cronometer to determine how much calcium I actually absorb per meal. I'm a vegetarian living on dairy+plants (with their phytates and/or oxalates that are binding to much of the calcium I eat with that meal).

Cronometer's advanced version has a Calcium Absorption function. Here's the issue:
While it has breakfast / lunch / dinner / snacks divisions, there is no way to total each individual meal's nutrition summary. Instead its end-of-day nutrition summary totals ALL the calcium, phytates, and oxalates to where it says I'm only absorbing 12% calcium, and has alarming red bars indicating going over the maximum of phytates and oxalates.
[See attached 6pg pdf of an average day]

Alternatively, if I set up one meal per day and ask for THAT nutritional summary I get a more realistic measure of 30-ish % calcium absorption and the phytates/oxalates amount is more realistic and not alarming.
[See attached 2 pg pdf of breakfast]

I've made pdfs of the nutrition reports for my regular meals so I have those handy, and am planning to stop the subscription once I've gathered my research.

Has anyone else had this experience with Cronometer?
Any other workarounds to figure out what our bones are actually getting?

Thanks for any info!

Shared files

Toast_yog_tea_2pages (Toast_yog_tea_2pages.pdf)

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bswpb | @bswpb | Aug 27 10:25am

I use Cronometer. I like it a lot. If you click on the individual item it tells you the nutrients for that one. I don’t believe it can tell you how much is actually absorbed because everyone is different. They can’t know what conditions you might have to prevent absorption.

sueinthelou | @sueinthelou | 3 days ago

You can see an individual meal summary for each meal and the calcium absorption rate for that meal. On the meal you want to see slide it to the right to show the menu. Click on the menu and nutrition summary is at the bottom. See photo attached.

And absorption rate is most accurate at the meal level per AI when I questioned the accuracy at the per day level.