Weighing of bananas

carolynjzzy

Hi everyone,
I am new to this and am figuring everything out but I need to know how I add just a portion of banana? When I go to my food diary to add it I'm not sure how I do the amount. If seems like all the amounts offered are to large. I just had 48 grams of a banana or it weighed in at 1.7 oz or it was 1/2 cup.
I don't see how to log that portion.
Thank you for your help!

OliveGirl128

weigh it peeled on your food scale in grams and then find the banana entry that has the grams option (I know there's both fresh/frozen gram options in the database because I use both of them).

malibu927

Find an entry that allows you to change the serving size to grams. Enter in 48 servings if it goes by 1 gram, or .48 servings if it goes by 100 grams.

The one I use says "Bananas, raw" and has 89 calories for 100 grams, which is accurate.

thewindandthework

For your banana, do what the above comments suggested. Weigh it, peeled, in grams. Find one of the entries for USDA Banana and tell it how many grams your banana is. Easy!

If you've already eaten your banana and it's too late to weigh it in grams, go ahead and enter it as 48 grams (I calculated that using your 1.7 ounces, although I made an assumption about the kind of ounces you used; I'll explain what I mean later in this post).

When measuring solid and semisolid food, I recommend always using grams. Now I'll explain my reasoning, but feel free to skip the rest of this post if you don't care about weights and measurements.

One of the problems with other methods is volume versus weight. If you're measuring solid or semisolid food, weight is ALWAYS the way to go.

Thinks like cups and tablespoons are volume measurements that are just no good for solid and semisolid food. Nutritionally, 50 grams of apple puree is the same as 50 grams of roughly chopped apple, but the chopped apples could easily take twice as much volume. Due to these extreme inconsistencies, use volume measurements only for liquids.

When measuring by weight. I prefer grams over ounces, because there is less room for confusion. Also, because a gram is so much smaller than an ounce, I think it's easier to get a more accurate result with an affordable scale.

But the main issue with ounces is that there are more than one kind of ounce. Avoirdupois ounces are the ones you would want to use to weigh food, and that's fine! But some scales have other types of ounces, like fluid ounces (which assumes you're weighing water) or troy ounces (which I'm not even sure about but I think has something to do with precious metals). When I calculated your 48 grams of banana, I assumed you were using the Avoirdupois ounce.

A lot of folks don't know the difference, though, and end up entering nonsensical things like 50 fluid ounces of broccoli. That means that a lot of the entries in the MFP food database are incorrect!

With grams there is no confusion. Still some wrong entries, but they are far fewer. Someone who's weighing things in grams is more likely to be doing it right.

OliveGirl128

malibu927 wrote: »

Find an entry that allows you to change the serving size to grams. Enter in 48 servings if it goes by 1 gram, or .48 servings if it goes by 100 grams.

The one I use says "Bananas, raw" and has 89 calories for 100 grams, which is accurate.

This! You explained it better than I did

JeepHair77

48 grams is a pretty small banana. Did you eat half a banana? My bananas are usually between 90 and 110 grams.

I weigh the whole thing, then eat it, then weigh the peel and subtract from the original total. Does that make sense? And I weigh in grams, never ounces.