Ground Beef Calories

heggleston921
heggleston921 Posts: 41 Member
in Food and Nutrition
My question is this: when given a calorie count for, say, 4 oz of 85%/15% ground beef, does it include the fat that cooks out and stays in the pan or not? If so, how do you account for the calories of fat left there that you don't eat?

It seems to me that no matter what kind of ground beef you buy, you cook the vast majority of the fat out of the meat. Isn't the meat that's left still pretty lean?

Thanks for your help.

Replies

  • elikis
    elikis Posts: 1 Member
    Hmmmm, interesting question!! I think you should just switch to ground turkey!! Cut out the ground beef altogether :smile:
  • kcrews2007
    kcrews2007 Posts: 1 Member
    I have the same question and it doesn't appear that it was ever answered properly.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,192 Member
    kcrews2007 wrote: »
    I have the same question and it doesn't appear that it was ever answered properly.

    That's because it's pretty much unanswerable with exactitude. What percent of the fat cooks out? Hard to know, unless one cools the fat that's left in the pan, pours off any extra juice/water that isn't fat, and weighs the fat then subtracts. Even then, it's a rough measurement, and a time-consuming, maybe obsessive process.

    85/15 beef is 15% fat, so a quarter pound of raw beef has around 17g of fat. Not all of it cooks out. 17g of fat has 153 calories.

    USDA Food Data Central (SR Legacy category) estimates that a broiled quarter pound of 85/15 beef has 11.9g of fat, which is bound to be somewhat approximate. That would be 107 calories from fat. That seems to be one of the most fat-reducing cooking methods, producing a 46 calorie reduction. There are other estimates there**, for other cooking methods, and other fat/lean percentages.

    ** https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-search?query=beef ground&type=SR Legacy

    It comes down to how many hoops a person wants to jump through for a little more accuracy, in the context of how often they eat these burgers. They can choose to weigh raw and count it all; go through some process to estimate how much fat was lost and adjust the calories; or use one of the USDA cooked estimates.

    If I were eating this burger a couple of times a week, I'd probably weigh it raw and call it good. If I ate them more often, I might use the USDA cooked estimates. I don't think I'd go through a more complicated process than that, even if I ate them every day for every meal, but that's just me.

    Thing is, if a person mostly has some level of average repetition in their eating (and logging) routine, and adjusts their calorie goal based on average weekly personal weight loss experience after 4-6 weeks (whole menstrual periods) rather than believing the MFP/calculator estimate is gospel, then some level of routine imprecision isn't a big deal.

    My opinion only, of course.
  • Hobartlemagne
    Hobartlemagne Posts: 562 Member
    just measure the runoff, and log it in a negative amount as Suet

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