Confusion between raw/cooked calories

Frasl

So I wanted to figure out the calories I'd be eating in some bacon I fried today. When I weighed them RAW they weighed 120g. According to google this is 500 calories. Once they were cooked and dry I weighed them again, this time they weighed 65g (COOKED). According to google 65g of pan fried bacon is only 352 calories. Does this mean that 150 calories have just disappeared from the bacon? Am I misunderstanding this completely? Whenever I cook food that needs preparation from it's raw state, I always just add in the calories of it being raw (rice, pasta, oats, etc).

kamykraft

When you cook it, you lose a lot of the fat and bulk. So, I would imagine that would account for it. Kind of like a cup of raw spinach is very diferent than a cup of cooked -- it shrinks and when it cooks, you lose liquid and nutrients. Jsut my thoughts. Hope it helps.

husseycd

Most meat I weigh raw and don't worry about any extra calories I might now be eating because they dripped off (ie the fat). Bacon is the exception. It's just so fatty that raw vs cooked and drained are vastly different. Lean cuts of meat not so much.

nicsflyingcircus

The rest of the calories are soaked into your paper towel and sitting in your pan

ie rendered pork fat!

kirkor

Water loss (and in bacon's case, fat draining) from cooking

Don't get too wrapped up in the difference of each food before and after cooking.

Two main points:

1. always weigh raw, dry, uncooked, thawed, etc. when you can

2. be consistent over time in whatever method you use

lemurcat12

There's a significant different in the weights of most meat, raw vs. cooked, although bacon is an extreme example.

It means that you must use entries that specify cooked or raw weight, whatever applies to when you weighed it, or else get an inaccurate result.

For example, if you have an entry (or package information, which is usually for raw) saying that your chicken breasts raw are 110 calories per 100 grams and weigh them AFTER cooking and eat 100 grams and log 110, you are undercounting calories, the chicken you ate would have been more like 165 calories.

Bacon varies so much depending on the specific way it is cut, etc, that I'd go with the information on the package, if there is any. It's probably for weighed raw, if it doesn't state otherwise ("as prepared").

Frasl

Unfortunately it's from a local, unbranded butchers so there is absolutely no nutrition info available.

lemurcat12

That's similar to the kind of bacon I usually eat (from a local farm).

I use the USDA (no asterisk) "pork, cured, bacon, raw" entry, which is a shocking 458 for 100 grams raw (you can get bacon with far fewer calories from the grocery, IME). I kind of think (hope?) this might be an overestimate of the calories in my particular bacon, but it seemed the safest one to use.

Looking at it, there are also cooked entries (for pan fried and baked). The baked (my preferred method) is 548 calories for 100 grams cooked. This would be somewhat less shocking given the shrinkage, I bet. Maybe I'll try it next time I have bacon.

ana3067

What I would say is, whichever state you choose to weigh your food in, log it consistently and accurately. A lot of people will say "be consistent" and tell you to always weigh things raw, but honestly most of the time this isn't convenient unless you make it convenient for yourself.

What I do, and have done over the last 2-3 months, is weigh things in whatever state I weigh them in, and then use the appropriate nutritional information for the state I weighed them in. If I weighed my chicken raw for a casserole, I enter the raw weight into MFP using the raw chicken nutritional info (and btw, I do not use MFP's nutritional info, even if it comes from a nutritional database I much prefer looking foods up in a few databases to ensure accuracy and then I create the custom food for it with my desired measurement methods). If I'm cooking up a large piece of salmon for the whole family, I weigh out a piece after it has cooled off and enter that into the cooked salmon entry.

So, if you're going to eat all that bacon, enter it as raw bacon if you'd like. Or just enter in the cooked weight. Either way, use the correct nutritional data info. If you are over or under in calories by a few hundred today because of this, it's really not the end of the world.

lemurcat12

What I do, and have done over the last 2-3 months, is weigh things in whatever state I weigh them in, and then use the appropriate nutritional information for the state I weighed them in.

This. The way any serious error creeps in for meat is weighing cooked and using a raw entry, as you will be understating calories by a significant amount. So long as you use the right entry it should be okay.