UK food labels for brown rice, what do they mean?

Marleigh118

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but whenever I buy uncooked rice such as the Sainsburys Brown Rice, the label on the back is per serving cooked, not the raw weight. This confuses me because I would usually measure out raw. When it bases it on per serving cooked as per instructions, I’m confused as to how to track this because you could under or overcook the rice which would impact the water content and then the serving weight?

Jean

This is a very good question, but unfortunately one that we do not have an exact answer for, as it would depend on how the item was originally entered into the database. However, in general, foods do not lose mass during cooking except by losing moisture or possibly from fat run-off. Some frozen foods may lose a bit of water weight when cooked, if they have accumulated frost in the freezer. Generally speaking, in the long run, the change in weight is statistically insignificant and should not affect your goals.

As a rule of thumb, it should be safe to assume, if a food item does not mention a method of cooking it's most likely the item is meant to be in the uncooked or raw state. Please note, some items in our database are entered by other users, and they may not have clarified cooked vs. raw in these entries.

There is always a margin of error in everything involved in calorie counting: no one person's metabolism is exactly like another, so even our calculations of your calories needed for the day are not 100 percent precise to the exact calorie. We expect you will experience positive weight management results, even if the numbers are off, to a small degree due to loss of moisture between raw and cooked states, or even the inability to exactly pinpoint your metabolic needs, using generalized equations.