Does spaghetti really have 300 calories/100g?
Replies
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BarbaraHelen2013 wrote: »texasredreb wrote: »It’s a sad reality that pasta is so calorie laden.
It's not really though. There are a lot of foods that are more calorie dense. It can easily be made part of reasonable calorie dinners. You just can't eat giant plates smothered with fatty sauces
Whilst you’re right, there are many more calorie dense foods out there (nuts spring to mind!), it’s still hard for some of us to fit pasta into our numbers. This is not aimed at you, specifically, but I do become irritated when I see people say similar things. I’m a very petite woman in my late 50s who maintains at 1134cals so must drop to 800-900cals to lose even a half pound a week. My favourite meals would ideally be pasta based (for the flavour of the tomato based sauce, generally) but I have to keep it to an occasional treat when I can fit it in.
I appreciate that everyone is different but the sweeping generalisation that pasta can reasonably be accommodated is still somewhat erroneous!
I find it hard to believe that a grown woman would be needing to only eat 900 calories a day to lose 1/2 pound a week, regardless of how old they are, unless they were closer to 4" than 5". My guess is that you are actually inaccurate with your logging and instead of eating 900 calories a day you are closer to 1200 calories a day. Coupled with this is the fact that whenever someone claims that they need to lose less than 1200 calories a day and make their diaries public, logging errors can always be found.
If I were sedentary I'd be maintaining weight on around 1400 calories a day and I am almost 50, 4"11 and around 95 pounds. That being said, I very rarely have pasta because I prefer the sauces to be with spiralised zucchini, which also allows for things I'd prefer instead. Almonds and cashew nuts I am talking to you!10 -
I actually measured 2 oz of cooked whole wheat spaghetti the other night on the food scale. It’s the size of a baseball and it was 200 calories. I can imagine the plates of pasta in restaurants is 1000 calories easy.0
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Seems like you should weigh your pasta before you cook it then!
Ideally, yes.
But if not possible then just make sure you are going by the cooked amount.
I always measure it cooked - if I cook spaghetti, I cook for more than one person and our servings are not equal (so I cant just divide total by 1/2)
But I go by an entry for cooked spaghetti, not dry.
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denisemr77 wrote: »I actually measured 2 oz of cooked whole wheat spaghetti the other night on the food scale. It’s the size of a baseball and it was 200 calories. I can imagine the plates of pasta in restaurants is 1000 calories easy.
No, it wasn't. Two ounces of dried pasta (whole wheat or refined wheat) is 200 kcal. When you cook that dried pasta, it takes on water, and thus weighs more, but it's still 200 kcal. So 2 oz. of cooked spaghetti weighed less than 2 oz. when it was dry, and is thus less than 200 kcal.6 -
paperpudding wrote: »Seems like you should weigh your pasta before you cook it then!
Ideally, yes.
But if not possible then just make sure you are going by the cooked amount.
I always measure it cooked - if I cook spaghetti, I cook for more than one person and our servings are not equal (so I cant just divide total by 1/2)
But I go by an entry for cooked spaghetti, not dry.
A little finicky, but what I do is this:
Total cooked weight / total dry weight x dry weight of my planned serving = cooked weight of my planned serving
Example: If I pre-logged 60g of dry pasta for me but I'm also cooking another 100g for my husband, I would figure out my serving like so, assuming the weight of the cooked pasta is 480 grams:
480 / 160 x 60 = 180 grams of cooked pasta for me.
Logging it cooked works too, of course--just leaving this here for anyone who might want to log a dry value while cooking for more than one person.
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Weighing cooked pasta is a poor, unreliable method. The cooked weight is determined by how it is cooked and what type of pasta it is. Typical overcooked spaghetti can have as much as 30% more weight than al dente pasta. Penne absorbs less water than angel hair and thus weighs less. Measurement of cooked volume is the same problem. Overcooked farfalle will compact in a cup to a much smaller volume than the same weight of rigatoni. Drainage further complicates the process. Al dente spaghetti can be drained to almost dry. Try that with Penne.
Move on from this and weigh it dry. Your guess as to how muuch of the dry weight you had will be far more accurate than weighing or measuring cooked pasta.4 -
I weigh pasta before and after cooking. If I cooked 8 oz pasta that is 4 servings. So no matter what it weighs after cooking you still have 4 servings. I just reweigh and divide the grams by 4(or however many servings you want to get out of that 8 oz of pasta) to give me the weight for each serving. Yes it means weighing twice but if I want to be that accurate(instead of just eyeballing) then that is the most accurate way to do it. At least that I have been able to come up with.2
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I haven't eaten any pasta for a long time and I don't miss it, because I think it is too high in cals and does not provide as much nutritional value per serving as other things that I prefer to eat instead.1
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wilson10102018 wrote: »Weighing cooked pasta is a poor, unreliable method. The cooked weight is determined by how it is cooked and what type of pasta it is. Typical overcooked spaghetti can have as much as 30% more weight than al dente pasta. Penne absorbs less water than angel hair and thus weighs less. Measurement of cooked volume is the same problem. Overcooked farfalle will compact in a cup to a much smaller volume than the same weight of rigatoni. Drainage further complicates the process. Al dente spaghetti can be drained to almost dry. Try that with Penne.
Move on from this and weigh it dry. Your guess as to how muuch of the dry weight you had will be far more accurate than weighing or measuring cooked pasta.
Yes you can do that if you want.
Or you can be like me and weigh it cooked, if that is more convenient for you.
I dont claim it is the most accurate method - but it is accurate enough.
MY aim isnt to be the most accurate logger in the world - it is to find an easy convenient system that works for me.
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Yep, pasta calories add up quickly.
Not quite correct. All calories add up quickly. Think about it:
carbohydrates: 4kcal per gram
protein: 4kcal per gram
fat: 9kcal per gram
Most food consists of a mixture of all those things, plus possibly some water which doesn't have calories. So most things that don't contain water come in at 400-900kcal per 100gr.3
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