Can this nutrition info be correct?

ksy1969

Need2Exerc1se wrote: »

ksy1969 wrote: »

I think some over thinking is going on here. Check out a few more raw meats and you will see the same thing. I just looked at USDA - Sirloin Steak and 85g of raw meat only has approximately 34g of solid macro nutrients. the rest is water. That is why when you cook it, if you over cook it, it becomes a quarter of what it used to be.

I've never had fish shrink to 1/4 of it's size no matter how long I cook it. My mind is offically blown.

Ok, I might have exaggerated a little bit on the shrinkage.

Interesting though, I fried up some cubed chicken breast on Sunday. They went from 20oz of raw meat to 12.5 oz of cooked meat and they were not over cooked. They were just starting to brown. I am guessing if I would have over cooked them they would have been at least a third of their original starting weight.

Edited for spelling

RockstarWilson

RockstarWilson wrote: »

Nothing (solid) has only one calorie per gram of weight. That is all.

Edit: No solid food that has no water weight is 1 calorie per gram. Fish, if it has a lot of water in it, will weigh more than its nutrients indicate. The water would theoretically evaporate while it cooks, and you are left with a lighter fish. What the package shows (if there is a package) is calories/gram per pre-cooked fish. If you weighed the fish after cooking, you would notice a lot more fish per gram, as the water has been extracted. It is why ground beef loses a ton of its calories if it is prepared properly, although for different reasons. A lot of the fat is released in cooking ground beef, and while the raw portion is valued at 4 oz, the actual yield has about 25% less fat if it is drained, so it has less calories at 3 oz.

Fish raw has about 80% of its weight in water, and when it is cooked, that figure lowers to about 70% (and this figure is adjustable to how much you cook it). The more you cook it, the less water there is, and less dense the fish becomes. So, in theory, if you cook it light, you can come close to that because the water has not completely been extracted from the fish while cooking. I used tilapia as an example, as it is one of the leaner fishes. But that might be why you are seeing what you are seeing; water weight, which has no calories, comprises most the weight of the fish. Mathematically speaking, calories only comprise about 25-40% of the cooked fish, depending on how it is prepared, as protein has 4 calories per gram (21x4=84, 1.5x9=13.5, so 97 calories for ~23g of food, proving the 4/4/9 proportions). So if 100 grams is what you physically see, only about 23% is actual food.

I guess if you don't dissect that information, then you are correct....but it is just water. If the food is substantial (does not have a lot of water), the mass in the nutrients will equal the mass of the food. If it has water, the water mass is the mass of the food minus the total mass of the nutrients.

That is what I meant by that. Water is a liquid, so what I said about solid food not having 1 calorie per gram is correct. It must have at least 4. I guess I got a little technical, but eh. Take it as you wish.