Calorie Count for an ingredient both raw or cooked

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Chris_Jarvis

3:21 am
22 Nov 19
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I have recently commenced the 5:2 diet & have trolled through the obligatory Calorie Counting books. While I am getting up to speed with this I am puzzled by the variation between the same ingredient shown as raw & then cooked particularly for steamed or grilled where i am not adding any oils or other ingredients. This is very obvious for fish, chicken, pork & lamb where either steaming, grilling or dry stir fry cooking techniques are used. I am finding that the calorie value for a cooked portion of the raw ingredient is either not listed or is sometimes very difficult to locate. Can anyone explain this variation & what listed value as either raw or cooked should I use in the calculation of the meals I am preparing?

LJoyce

7:40 am
22 Nov 19
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Chris,

Where you are cooking something that has a water content, some of that water will evaporate during cooking. That means that what started as 100g of raw weight, may only weigh 75g after cooking, due to the water loss.

For example, if you weigh 100grams of raw chicken breast before cooking it, that portion will be 438 kilojoules (104 calories). That 100g of raw chicken breast, when weighed after you’ve grilled it, probably now only weighs 70-75 grams. If you added no fats it’s still 104 calories, but it no longer weighs 100 grams.
If you weighed 100g of cooked chicken breast it would be 615 kilojoules (146 calories). This portion size would probably have weighed about 130 grams when it was raw.
All meat and fish will shrink during cooking in this way.

This means that the difference in calorie counts for raw and cooked meats/fish etc are because the portions are actually different, even if they are both 100g.

It doesn’t matter whether you weigh your food before or after you cook it just as long as you use the correct calorie count for whichever state it’s in when you weigh it.