Weigh food raw or cooked?

pmontoya9
pmontoya9 Posts: 10 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Should I weigh meats ,poultry and fish raw? Or cooked?

Replies

  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,986 Member
    Raw! and when you can use the nutritional info on the packaging, provided it's uncooked. When you cook meat it loses water. How much depends entirely on how you prepare it and the country you're in. Lots of countries inject meat with fluids to some extend.

    Btw, the same is also true for pasta, rice, etc. Only they absorb various amounts of water, depending on how it's cooked.
  • pmontoya9
    pmontoya9 Posts: 10 Member
    Omg!!!! I have been doing it cooked! Thank you so much for your input this changes everything!
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,986 Member
    There are database entries for raw and for cooked meat. As long as you chose the right one you're probably fairly ok. But with cooking it really depends on how you cook it. Thus I would chose raw.
  • pmontoya9
    pmontoya9 Posts: 10 Member
    Thank you so much ! One last question donyou weigh your eggs?
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,986 Member
    I can't eat eggs as they cause reflux for me, but those few times where I made something with eggs, like cake, then I do weigh them. When I buy medium-sized eggs here they fit best with a large egg database entry, and hence I'd eat more calories than I thought. I weight pretty much everything because I can absolutely not estimate. But for my dinner weighing usually takes less than a minute. Thus no issue.
  • Terytha
    Terytha Posts: 2,097 Member
    Raw for lean meats only. Cooked for high fat meats.

    Like bacon! Always weigh bacon cooked. You cook off so much of the fat and drain it, so there's no point weighing all that fat when you won't eat it. A 500 gram package of bacon becomes around 120 grams cooked usually, that's a lot of mass you aren't eating.

    Chicken and fish should be weighed raw, they have no fat to cook off.

    I don't bother weighing whole eggs. One large egg is 70 calories. There's not gonna be a large enough fluctuation in egg sizes to change that much.

    I do weigh when I use like, cartons of egg whites.
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 14,311 Member
    Terytha wrote: »
    I don't bother weighing whole eggs. One large egg is 70 calories. There's not gonna be a large enough fluctuation in egg sizes to change that much.

    I do weigh when I use like, cartons of egg whites.

    I know that the way you handle your food logging absolutely works for you, so please take my comment with a grain of salt as you obviously don't need to change what works for you!

    Using 50g edible raw = 72g (the USDA value), you would expect the six egg omelette I made today to use 300g of eggs instead of the 338g I measured!
  • wilson10102018
    wilson10102018 Posts: 1,306 Member
    It seems on this topic which is repeated endlessly, that common sense has been abandoned. First, know whether the calorie reference you are using is for cooked or raw food. It will never be correct until they match up. Then, use raw weight if you are eating everything you have weighed: bones, fat, skin, gristle and, yes, even juice. Apply this rule to fruit, vegetables, rice, grains, cereal, pasta, beans and lentils. Weight them raw.
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 28,052 Member
    pmontoya9 wrote: »
    Thank you so much ! One last question donyou weigh your eggs?

    I started weighing eggs when I exclusively bought farm stand eggs and I could see that the size varied wildly. I've since learned that while not always visible to the eye, supermarket egg sizes vary too, so now I weigh them as well. I do this mostly to match them with uses - if I'm covering a piece of toast I will want a larger egg than if I am cooking an egg to go over an English muffin. (I use different size pans for this as well.)

    I weigh while still in the shell and match them to Medium - Jumbo and pencil this on the shell.

    When appropriate, I will get the weight of just the eggs and log this in grams (rather than size.)
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 28,052 Member
    pmontoya9 wrote: »
    Should I weigh meats ,poultry and fish raw? Or cooked?

    Unfortunately, the green check marks in the MFP database are used for both USER-created entries and ADMIN-created entries that MFP pulled from the USDA database. A green check mark for USER-created entries just means enough people have upvoted the entry - it is not necessarily correct.

    To find ADMIN entries for whole foods, I get the syntax from the USDA database and paste that into MFP.

    https://fdc.nal.usda.gov

    The USDA changed the platform for their database in 2019 and it is unfortunately a little more difficult to use. I use the “SR Legacy” tab - that seems to be what MFP used to pull in entries.

    Ex for cooked chicken breast: "chicken, breast, cooked, roasted" gave me https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/?query=chicken, breast, cooked and from that you can see the syntax for the MFP entry to use is "Chicken, broilers or fryers, breast, meat only, cooked, roasted"

    All USDA entries for meat will include whether it is cooked or raw.

    Note: any MFP entry that includes "USDA" was USER entered.

    I use raw when practical but don't sweat about using cooked.

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