Apples - fresh or dried - calorie question...

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sonjavon
sonjavon Posts: 1,019 Member
in Food and Nutrition
I posted on my FB page earlier that I was making apple crisps... apples sliced thinly and sprinkled with cinnamon then baked at 250 for 2 hours (by the way... yummy). A friend of mine posted that dried fruit has more calories than fresh fruit. Ummm.. what? I could see it having more weight if you're looking at weight.... but if I take an apple and dry it... and eat that apple... I wouldn't think that it would have more calories than a fresh apple. It's certainly not as filling... but more calories? Is there something that I don't know?????

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  • aerome
    aerome Posts: 171 Member
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    Dried fruit has more calories BY WEIGHT than fresh (because if you eat 1 pound of fresh apples vs 1 pound of dried apples, you're going to eat a lot more apples if they're dried because each individual apple weighs less). All you're doing when you dry it is removing water. (Unless of course you're adding sugar or some other ingredient to it that has calories)

    *Edited for clarity. :)
  • Momma2four
    Momma2four Posts: 1,534
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    Here is something I found on the web.



    "Answer: There are two reasons why dried fruit may have more calories and sugar than fresh fruit. First, sometimes sugar is added to dried fruits such as cranberries. Since cranberries are so tart, very few people would eat them without the added sugar, but of course the added sugar adds calories.
    The more common reason that dried fruits will usually have more calories and sugar is because the dehydration process removes so much of the water normally found in the fruit. That missing water would normally make the fresh fruit larger than the dried fruit, so there would be more pieces of dried fruit in the same serving size. For example, one grape has seven calories and one raisin has seven calories, however one cup of grapes has about 60 calories, and a cup of raisins has over 400 calories. This doesn't happen because the raisin company added sugar, it happened because without the water, the raisins take up a lot less space. More raisins fit into one cup so that means one cup of raisins has more sugar and calories than grapes."


    So I would think if you still only ate one apple based on this above answer it would be the same amount of calories as a regular apple it is just you need more dried apple to fill the volume of a fresh apple. So eat your apple just only eat one
  • rtmama
    rtmama Posts: 403 Member
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    Great answers from everyone, but I just wanted to say that your recipe does sound yummy! I might try that!
  • sonjavon
    sonjavon Posts: 1,019 Member
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    I'm just glad to know that I'm not crazy. I found that same on article on the internet -but I also found something about exposing the sugars to the air which made them more concentrated... and I thought, "Well - maybe I AM crazy". LOL!
  • Sunsh1ne
    Sunsh1ne Posts: 879 Member
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    It's impossible to add calories to food by removing the water. They are more DENSE in calories, but not HIGHER and calories. (And for those who have forgotten high school science, density is mass over volume. So if you leave the mass the same, but decrease the volume, the density increases.)

    As long as dried fruit isn't sweetened, it's just as good for you as it was wet.

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