Does spaghetti really have 300 calories/100g?
Replies
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texasredreb wrote: »It’s a sad reality that pasta is so calorie laden.
It's not really though. There are a lot of foods that are more calorie dense. It can easily be made part of reasonable calorie dinners. You just can't eat giant plates smothered with fatty sauces
I love giant plates smothered with fatty sauces though!3 -
BarbaraHelen2013 wrote: »paperpudding wrote: »Yes and wouldn't there be about 56 penne in that dish?
Therefore 56g if they are a gram each? How is it a lot more?
Also if the total meal is 500 - 550 calories, how can that only leave you 250 calories for rest of the day? That would be a daily total of 750 - 800 calories?
#confused
I can count at least 73 visible pieces of penne, and it’s clearly not arranged in a single layer because (who does that - on the other hand, who counts pieces of penne in a photo!) 😳there are visible ‘points’ below the surface!
If you’d read further up the thread and, indeed, further up the post you replied to you’d have seen me clearly state that my calorie limit is 800 if I want to lose even a half pound per week. As a very short woman in my late 50s I maintain on 1134 cals.
[\confusion?]
Well, poster of the photo has clarified the amount so no need to count 73 pieces of penne
And yes you did state your calorie amount is 800 calories - and that is too low, even for short women in their 50's.
You may be one of the women for whom 1200 is appropriate - but no, not 800.
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Last night for dinner we had about 150 grams split between my wife and I with home made tomato sauce, meatballs and a salad. Lovely dinner. Well balanced macros and the calories fit well within the day and was very satisfying and filling.
I think, as someone mentioned above, that crazy restaurant pasta portions have distorted our perceptions. My italian grandmother would serve what looked like a 2 or 3 ounce portion. What I see in some restaurants is 6 ounce portions or more. No need.
If you are only eating 800 or so calories, guess you are out of luck in more ways that one. Nobody should be eating that little.6 -
One serving of pasta is pitifully small. I plan my day around eating two servings when I’m making a meal, so at least my plate is *almost* full.
Question: I’ve been measuring the cooked weight. Am I supposed to measure out the uncooked weight, and boil it separately from what I’m serving my family? I hope not. What a pain if that’s true.
The nutritional info on the back of the package is for dry weight. So to get the most accurate results, measuring a dry portion is the best option. If doing that is not feasible, you should weigh your cooked pasta and then convert it back into dry. The issue is that cooked weight can vary pretty widely based on cooking time, so there's not one easy way to do it. General recommendations seem to say that cooked pasta weight is about double that of dry, but for some people, it ends up being more. It is probably better to do a few tests of dry weight to cooked weight based on how you cook it, to get an approximate answer to that equation. Then you can just convert back to dry from your cooked weights going forward.0 -
Cahgetsfit wrote: »I eat at 1300 cals and eat pasta frequently. It’s not hard.
For some of us pasta is a trigger food. So it IS hard. I CAN eat a tiny little 100g serving of cooked pasta with heaps of sauce and make it fit. But it's not satisfying for me personally.
I LIKE the 3-people serving sizes in restaurants. That's how much pasta i'd eat normally prior to calorie counting.
So i'd rather eat other stuff that would satisfy me more than a piddly little tiny serving of pasta that will just leave me craving more. I cook a mean pasta. It's hard to eat just 100g of it.
But nobody has mentioned pasta as a trigger food except you. If it’s not a trigger food, eating smaller portions and fitting them into your calories is not hard.
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The biggest issue here (outside of the OP's innocent question) is people assuming satiety is universal. I can cook 56g of pasta with 100+g of vegetables and some marinara sauce, have a small serving of protein on the side, and have what for me is a filling 450 calorie dinner. It wouldn't be filling for someone else. That's real life. 1 serving of pasta isn't worth it for some people, for others it is. And I do think some folks are just conditioned to think they need a giant plate of pasta to feel full, and they would get used to a more reasonable serving with practice. Whether or not it's worth it or not for them to bother trying is up to them, of course.BarbaraHelen2013 wrote: »paperpudding wrote: »Yes and wouldn't there be about 56 penne in that dish?
Therefore 56g if they are a gram each? How is it a lot more?
Also if the total meal is 500 - 550 calories, how can that only leave you 250 calories for rest of the day? That would be a daily total of 750 - 800 calories?
#confused
I can count at least 73 visible pieces of penne, and it’s clearly not arranged in a single layer because (who does that - on the other hand, who counts pieces of penne in a photo!) 😳there are visible ‘points’ below the surface!
If you’d read further up the thread and, indeed, further up the post you replied to you’d have seen me clearly state that my calorie limit is 800 if I want to lose even a half pound per week. As a very short woman in my late 50s I maintain on 1134 cals.
[\confusion?]
It is not typical for short women in their 50's to have to eat a VLCD to lose any weight. Your situation is quite the outlier, so expecting foods to only be labeled satiating if you could eat them on an 800 calorie diet is not really useful to the vast majority of the people here.
*
Anyway, the package weight on every pasta I've seen is the dry weight. 56g dry, when cooked, will fill a typical single-serving bowl on it's own with some sauce, and a full size dinner plate when combined with lots of veggies and protein.13 -
I got a bit inspired. While wheat pasta with a cna of tuna, some ligtt mayonnaise, and a touch of hot sauce. May not be fancy but it's tasty and filling. It clocked in at around 500-550 calories, which is a below average dinner for me, and could even be worked into a 1200 calorie diet pretty easily.
Dang that looks good. Toss in some spinach or greens of choice and a few chunks of tomato. Pretty sure this is going on my menu next week.1 -
I love pasta and eat it 3 or 4 times a week. When I am not eating pasta I am eating rice. I make it fit into whatever calorie allotment that I am eating at.
This is one of my favorite low calorie pasta recipes...
Nutrition...
Serving: 1/4th of recipe,
Calories: 254kcal,
Carbohydrates: 51g,
Protein: 7.5g,
Fat: 5.5g
Recipe found at...
https://www.skinnytaste.com/angel-hair-with-zucchini-and-tomatoes-5/
The only change that I make is to use 4 zucchini instead of 2 and I also add a proteing such as shrimp, chicken or tuna. I sometimes also add spinach. I end up with a huge plate of food for around 400 calories and am able to fit it in even when I am eating at 1200 limit.
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sigh. today is the italian fest right outside of my work. giant garlic bread bowls of pasta.4
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wilson10102018 wrote: »I have seen this argument before. Everyone thinks they need to plate a huge amount of pasta because when they go out to eat, since the pasta is the cheapest ingredient on the menu, they get a ton of it.
Just weigh out 3 oz and cook it up al dente and plate it with an appropriate amount of tomato sauce and see for yourself.Yes this is it. Restaurants give us enough pasta for 3 people at least.
I did a high carb diet preparing for an event a few months ago, and that involved a lot of whole wheat pasta with some chicken and mild seasoning. It was a actually hard for me to get as many calories as I wanted, because the pasta filled me up so much more than my normal diet.
Yes, I add extra veggies to takeout Pad Thai and get three servings out of it.1 -
BarbaraHelen2013 wrote: »texasredreb wrote: »It’s a sad reality that pasta is so calorie laden.
It's not really though. There are a lot of foods that are more calorie dense. It can easily be made part of reasonable calorie dinners. You just can't eat giant plates smothered with fatty sauces
Whilst you’re right, there are many more calorie dense foods out there (nuts spring to mind!), it’s still hard for some of us to fit pasta into our numbers. This is not aimed at you, specifically, but I do become irritated when I see people say similar things. I’m a very petite woman in my late 50s who maintains at 1134cals so must drop to 800-900cals to lose even a half pound a week. My favourite meals would ideally be pasta based (for the flavour of the tomato based sauce, generally) but I have to keep it to an occasional treat when I can fit it in.
I appreciate that everyone is different but the sweeping generalisation that pasta can reasonably be accommodated is still somewhat erroneous!
I find it hard to believe that a grown woman would be needing to only eat 900 calories a day to lose 1/2 pound a week, regardless of how old they are, unless they were closer to 4" than 5". My guess is that you are actually inaccurate with your logging and instead of eating 900 calories a day you are closer to 1200 calories a day. Coupled with this is the fact that whenever someone claims that they need to lose less than 1200 calories a day and make their diaries public, logging errors can always be found.
If I were sedentary I'd be maintaining weight on around 1400 calories a day and I am almost 50, 4"11 and around 95 pounds. That being said, I very rarely have pasta because I prefer the sauces to be with spiralised zucchini, which also allows for things I'd prefer instead. Almonds and cashew nuts I am talking to you!10 -
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I actually measured 2 oz of cooked whole wheat spaghetti the other night on the food scale. It’s the size of a baseball and it was 200 calories. I can imagine the plates of pasta in restaurants is 1000 calories easy.0
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Seems like you should weigh your pasta before you cook it then!
Ideally, yes.
But if not possible then just make sure you are going by the cooked amount.
I always measure it cooked - if I cook spaghetti, I cook for more than one person and our servings are not equal (so I cant just divide total by 1/2)
But I go by an entry for cooked spaghetti, not dry.
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denisemr77 wrote: »I actually measured 2 oz of cooked whole wheat spaghetti the other night on the food scale. It’s the size of a baseball and it was 200 calories. I can imagine the plates of pasta in restaurants is 1000 calories easy.
No, it wasn't. Two ounces of dried pasta (whole wheat or refined wheat) is 200 kcal. When you cook that dried pasta, it takes on water, and thus weighs more, but it's still 200 kcal. So 2 oz. of cooked spaghetti weighed less than 2 oz. when it was dry, and is thus less than 200 kcal.6 -
paperpudding wrote: »Seems like you should weigh your pasta before you cook it then!
Ideally, yes.
But if not possible then just make sure you are going by the cooked amount.
I always measure it cooked - if I cook spaghetti, I cook for more than one person and our servings are not equal (so I cant just divide total by 1/2)
But I go by an entry for cooked spaghetti, not dry.
A little finicky, but what I do is this:
Total cooked weight / total dry weight x dry weight of my planned serving = cooked weight of my planned serving
Example: If I pre-logged 60g of dry pasta for me but I'm also cooking another 100g for my husband, I would figure out my serving like so, assuming the weight of the cooked pasta is 480 grams:
480 / 160 x 60 = 180 grams of cooked pasta for me.
Logging it cooked works too, of course--just leaving this here for anyone who might want to log a dry value while cooking for more than one person.
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Weighing cooked pasta is a poor, unreliable method. The cooked weight is determined by how it is cooked and what type of pasta it is. Typical overcooked spaghetti can have as much as 30% more weight than al dente pasta. Penne absorbs less water than angel hair and thus weighs less. Measurement of cooked volume is the same problem. Overcooked farfalle will compact in a cup to a much smaller volume than the same weight of rigatoni. Drainage further complicates the process. Al dente spaghetti can be drained to almost dry. Try that with Penne.
Move on from this and weigh it dry. Your guess as to how muuch of the dry weight you had will be far more accurate than weighing or measuring cooked pasta.4 -
I weigh pasta before and after cooking. If I cooked 8 oz pasta that is 4 servings. So no matter what it weighs after cooking you still have 4 servings. I just reweigh and divide the grams by 4(or however many servings you want to get out of that 8 oz of pasta) to give me the weight for each serving. Yes it means weighing twice but if I want to be that accurate(instead of just eyeballing) then that is the most accurate way to do it. At least that I have been able to come up with.2
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I haven't eaten any pasta for a long time and I don't miss it, because I think it is too high in cals and does not provide as much nutritional value per serving as other things that I prefer to eat instead.1
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wilson10102018 wrote: »Weighing cooked pasta is a poor, unreliable method. The cooked weight is determined by how it is cooked and what type of pasta it is. Typical overcooked spaghetti can have as much as 30% more weight than al dente pasta. Penne absorbs less water than angel hair and thus weighs less. Measurement of cooked volume is the same problem. Overcooked farfalle will compact in a cup to a much smaller volume than the same weight of rigatoni. Drainage further complicates the process. Al dente spaghetti can be drained to almost dry. Try that with Penne.
Move on from this and weigh it dry. Your guess as to how muuch of the dry weight you had will be far more accurate than weighing or measuring cooked pasta.
Yes you can do that if you want.
Or you can be like me and weigh it cooked, if that is more convenient for you.
I dont claim it is the most accurate method - but it is accurate enough.
MY aim isnt to be the most accurate logger in the world - it is to find an easy convenient system that works for me.
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Yep, pasta calories add up quickly.
Not quite correct. All calories add up quickly. Think about it:
carbohydrates: 4kcal per gram
protein: 4kcal per gram
fat: 9kcal per gram
Most food consists of a mixture of all those things, plus possibly some water which doesn't have calories. So most things that don't contain water come in at 400-900kcal per 100gr.3
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