creating recipes, might be consuming more calories than you

registers

Keep in mind if you're modifying a recipe, raw food and cooked food has a different caloric content. My theory on this is that calories are heat energy. The more you cook it, the less heat energy it has. I think a good analogy for this is "how much can you burn of a burnt log?" If it's already burnt, it won't burn, all the energy is gone.

for example I am making a pork chop recipe it has 5 pork chops, well I don't have pork chops I have pork shoulder cuts. So I have to replace the caloric content. I did the math and 5 "cooked" pork chops that wight 5.5oz is 1080 calories. Okay that's cool no big deal. So you go look up the caloric content of pork shoulder cooked... that is 18 calories per ounce. So you divide 1080 by 18 which gives you... 60oz, makes sense. Well, this isn't right. SO you will be using 60oz of "raw" pork, not cooked. You know how many calories are in 1oz of raw pork? 67 calories, that's more than triple the cooked caloric content.

rawFoodCalories * x = cookedFoodCalories
67 * x = 18 (x is .26)

this means that 26% of calories remain for every ounce of pork we cook.

Now we have to figure out how many ounces we need...
(rawfoodCalories * %ofremainingCalories) * x = total ounces
(67 * .26)x = 652
x = 37 ounces of raw pork to yield 652 calories of cooked pork.

So applying this formula lets see what happens If I use 60oz of raw pork from the example above. Remember that 26% of calories remain for every ounce of raw pork we use there is 67 calories per oz. That is 4020 calories :-O
4020 * .26 = 1045 calories

Of course someone isn't going to eat this much pork in one sitting. Someone MIGHT do this if they prepare food for an entire week. Don't think this applies to pork, this applies to a lot of foods. I don't even agree pork is a healthy choice, It's just what I have on hand. The point of all this is to show that the calories of food change as you cook them, so make sure you're very careful.

chrisfnet

Have you confirmed the validity of your mathematical derivation using a calorimeter?

registers

Have you confirmed the validity of your mathematical derivation using a calorimeter?

That's a good question. I just looked up the calories for the food I wanted, and there are obvious different answers of caloric content. I'd assume these have been varified with a calorimeter. If they're not, that would make most caloric guides inaccurate.

dragonbug300

Have you confirmed the validity of your mathematical derivation using a calorimeter?

Agreed. I'd be curious to see how it measures up... especially considering that water content is the first to go (evaporated via cooking) and fat is the last. I'm thinking that the nutritional content remains relatively similar.

Example:
Roasted almonds vs. raw

Roasted: 169 cal/oz; 15g fat; 3.3g fiber; 1.4g sugar; 6.3g protein
Raw: 165 cal/oz; 14.6g fat; 2.7g fiber; 1.8g sugar; 5.5g protein

Variation may lie in different factors... e.g. the nutrient density may have increased per ounce because the roasting process dehydrated the almonds, making more almonds fit into a single ounce serving. Notice that sugar and fat decreased minimally.

rileysowner

Part of the problem here is not that calories are used when you cook, unless you are quite literally burning your food, but that moisture goes out of the food (sometimes is added depending on the food and cooking method). That means the weight changes (volume as well) thus the measure for cooked vs raw is different.

dustyhockeymom

That is why you have to be careful when inputing your ingredients to note if the listing is for raw or for cooked. The calorie content on 4 ounces of raw chicken breast is different than the listing for 4 ounces of grilled chicken breast (which would have weighed more than 4 ounces when raw). So what you have to decide is if you are going to weigh the ingredient before it is cooked or after and then find the listing that fits your choice.