Bacon calorie question

Use the food label you have in hand or the usda nutrient database. Most food labels specify that the nutrition info is for fried, not raw, bacon.

Most packages give calories for cooked bacon, and that will vary greatly depending on how long you cook your bacon for. What does your package say for bacon?

Also, it's not uncommon for slices to be bigger, so you can easily eat 30 to 50% extra calories without noticing... I bought some that said 42g or something for 3 slices pan fried, and when I weighed 2 pan fried slices (crispy too), they were 45g or something...

So you might be better off overestimating a bit there.

There are 3500 calories per pound of fat. 50g is 0.11 lbs, so at most the bacon would have 385 calories (though part of it is protein and water). But the information on the package assumes that you are going to cook the bacon. Most likely, they are assuming that you will cook the bacon to crispy, so that most of the fat is rendered. I've seen some packages say 50 calories for two and some say 70 calories for the same amount. I figure 50 calories means cooked until hard.

As for what I do about it, I don't worry about it. I don't weigh it and I cook it the way I like it. If the package says two slices is 50 calories, that's what I go with. Yes, that means I could be 300 calories off and that makes some people very nervous because I could be eating 2100 more calories per week than I think I am, just from eating bacon. If that is the case then those extra calories will show up during my weekly weigh-in. Once I see that I am eating too much, I don't have to know that it is bacon that is causing the overage, I just need to cut back.