Best practice for adding cooking oils and butter to food diary?

MunchMunchMunchkin
MunchMunchMunchkin Posts: 20
in Food and Nutrition
When I use oil or butter to prevent things from sticking to pans, how much do I end up actually consuming?

Replies

  • onefortyone
    onefortyone Posts: 531 Member
    You end up consuming exactly what you put in the pan - the traces left on the pan are just that - traces. You can't subtract them from your calorie count, just like you can't subtract calories from the traces of food left on your plate at the end of your meal.
  • dbmata
    dbmata Posts: 12,950 Member
    MunchMunchMunchkin wrote: »
    When I use oil or butter to prevent things from sticking to pans, how much do I end up actually consuming?

    weigh what you put in. Count it.
  • MunchMunchMunchkin
    MunchMunchMunchkin Posts: 20
    Is that much of it really absorbed by the food? Especially something like salmon that won't be tossed about much? Stuff like eggs I can understand soaking up everything though.
  • IvyLuci
    IvyLuci Posts: 117 Member
    You can't really know how much is left in the pan and how much is absorbed by the food, so it's safer to just log it all. Get non-stick pans so you don't need to use a lot of oil/butter if it's a problem.
  • Icandoityayme
    Icandoityayme Posts: 312 Member
    I just use butter flavored pam or a similar cooking spray and I love it. No calories, no sodium, no fats. Food just slides right off. I use butter on maybe potatoes and toast, ect. But to cook with I prefer the sprays.
  • Alatariel75
    Alatariel75 Posts: 18,227 Member
    edited October 2014
    Icandoityayme wrote: »
    I just use butter flavored pam or a similar cooking spray and I love it. No calories, no sodium, no fats. Food just slides right off. I use butter on maybe potatoes and toast, ect. But to cook with I prefer the sprays.

    It still has calories. They get away with saying 0 calories because they make the 'serving size' so small that it is under 5 calories and so by FDA rules they can round down to 0. Pam spray has the same calorie content as oil. It's just that by spraying you use less, though if you measured what you spray, you would generally find you'd use more than the serving size in any event.

  • peter56765
    peter56765 Posts: 352 Member
    Icandoityayme wrote: »
    I just use butter flavored pam or a similar cooking spray and I love it. No calories, no sodium, no fats. Food just slides right off. I use butter on maybe potatoes and toast, ect. But to cook with I prefer the sprays.

    Cooking sprays are not really zero calories. They are taking advantage of a loophole in how calories for a serving size are calculated. First off, they are pretty much 100% oil, i.e. fat, and an entire can is somewhere between 350 and 500 calories, depending on the size of the can. They get away with the zero calories claim because the serving size is assumed to be the amount in a 1/3 second spritz. That works out to approximately 3 calories however US regulations say anything under 5 can be advertised as 0. That's why they use 1/3 second as the serving size. Nobody I know can cover a pan in so short of a time. Most people I'd guess spray for 1 to 3 seconds.

    Still, spray cans do give you even coverage with a minimal amount of oil. They average around 7 calories per second. That's not all that much, but it ain't 0.
  • Need2Exerc1se
    Need2Exerc1se Posts: 13,575 Member
    MunchMunchMunchkin wrote: »
    Is that much of it really absorbed by the food? Especially something like salmon that won't be tossed about much? Stuff like eggs I can understand soaking up everything though.

    You are correct. It depends on the food and the amount of fat added to the pan. If you can see oil still in the pan after cooking then obviously it was not all absorbed, though some of what you see could be water cooked out of the food.

    The only way you could get a fairly accurate account is to weigh the empty pan, weigh the added oil, then weigh the pan after cooking. The difference in pan weight should be how much oil was left in the pan. Unless, of course, some of the food did stick to the pan.

    Any way you do it, it's just a guess.
  • malibu927
    malibu927 Posts: 17,562 Member
    Icandoityayme wrote: »
    I just use butter flavored pam or a similar cooking spray and I love it. No calories, no sodium, no fats. Food just slides right off. I use butter on maybe potatoes and toast, ect. But to cook with I prefer the sprays.

    That "zero calories" is for about a 1/4-1/2 second spray. I log a 2-second spray every time I use it and it gives me 18 calories.
  • MKEgal
    MKEgal Posts: 3,250 Member
    And when you're logging things (butter, olive oil, or really any non-processed food) search for USDA [whatever]. That should be the most accurate entry.

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