food weight- before or after cooking?

rob_base
rob_base Posts: 97
in Food and Nutrition
Like say you cook a piece of chicken - do use the raw weight of the meat or the cooked weight of the meat (which will be less due to shrinking) when you enter it in your food journal?

Replies

  • chezjuan
    chezjuan Posts: 747 Member
    It depends on what database entry I use specifies. Some are for raw food, and some are for cooked. For most meats, I find the raw entry and weigh it before I cook it.

    Be sure to match up the two - cooking reduces the weight of meats by up to 25% in come cases, mainly due to the loss of water during cooking. So if you were to weigh 4 oz raw, then cook it, and use a cooked entry at 4 ounces, you are shorting yourself. And if you do the reverse, you'd be underestimating calories consumed.
  • teamstanish
    teamstanish Posts: 274 Member
    Typically I use the raw weights, it's easier in my opinion. That way you don't have to worry about the variations caused by cooking (loss of water etc).
  • Francl27
    Francl27 Posts: 26,371 Member
    Depends on the entry. We cook for 4 here so weighing raw stuff is impossible pretty much, so I look for cooked entries.
  • rob_base
    rob_base Posts: 97
    So how do you know if an entry in here is ref raw or cooked food?
  • jenilla1
    jenilla1 Posts: 11,118 Member
    So how do you know if an entry in here is ref raw or cooked food?

    It often says so in the description.
  • eylia
    eylia Posts: 200 Member
    I always try and weigh before hand. Things (vegetables, for example) dry out in the oven and absorb water when you boil them, more or less depending on how long they're cooked for. Some things it doesn't matter so much, but meat and potatoes I'd rather know. The easiest way to know is to weigh the bare ingredient. Kind of the same concept as when we weigh ourselves; with as few discrepancies as we can.
  • Colorfan
    Colorfan Posts: 230 Member
    I try to look for stuff that has USDA in the description. It usually means the information came from the USDA database, which usually also has a description on whether its raw or cooked, peeled, etc.

    And if I have doubts, I compare the nutritional information I find on MFP with that of the USDA web database. Then I just keep using that particular food item whenever I want to log it again.
    http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/

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