olivetalks

So you’re on a diet and want to lose weight. Or you want to gain weight. Or you’re building your muscles. One way or another you need to know what are you eating, especially how many calories are in each meal and how many proteins. If you’re on Atkins you’d also like to know the carbohydrates content of the food. And if you’re on a low fat diet you want to know which foods contain lots of fat and which not at all.

How do you find all this information?

First you can start with labels on the foods themselves. For example the smoked salmon I’m eating right now came in a package with a note on the back saying that 100g of it contains:

• 162 kcal (When people talk about calories they usually mean food Calories or kilo calories – kcal – which means thousands of calories. Unless they’re physicists then they might be actually using calorie as a calorie not as a short cut for kcal. The recommended 2000 calories daily really means 2000 kcal. If you tried to live on 2000 calories – 2 kcal – you’d end up in a pretty bad shape pretty quickly.)
• 19.3 g of proteins
• less than 0.1 g carbohydrates
• 9.4 g fat
• some other stuff which might be also useful to know

The box with smoked salmon also mentions that it contains 200 g of the fish so if I eat half of it that means I’ll be consuming 162 kcal, 19.3 g proteins, 0 g carbohydrates and 9.4 g fat.

Another example – sliced cheese. The cheese came in a 450 g package containing 18 slices of cheese and with a label specifying the content of 100 g as:

• 358 kcal
• 27 g proteins
• less than 0.1 g carbohydrates
• 28 g fat
• big amount of calcium

One slice of this cheese weights 450 g / 18 = 25 g and provides 89.5 kcal, 6.75 g proteins, 0 g carbohydrates and 7 g fat.

Third example, cranberry juice. Again, let’s read the label. 100 ml of juice provides:

• 51 kcal
• less than 0.1 g proteins – no surprise here
• 12.2 g carbohydrates
• less than 0.1 g fat – again not surprising
• some vitamins

So if you drink 200 ml glass of cranberry juice you’ll consume 102 kcal and 24.4 g carbohydrates.

Let’s sum it up. 100 g of smoked salmon + two slices of cheese + 200 ml glass of cranberry juice. That gives us:

• 162 kcal from salmon + 189 kcal from cheese + 102 kcal from juice for a total of 453 kcal
• 19.3 g proteins from salmon + 13.5 g from cheese + 0 g from juice for a total of 32.8 g of proteins
• 0 g carbohydrates from salmon + 0 g from cheese + 24.4 g from juice for a total of 24.4 g of carbohydrates
• 9.4 g fat from salmon + 14 g from cheese + 0 g from juice for a total of 23.4 g of fat

In general you can find labels with these values on all pre-packaged food. Depending on the shop the labels can be present even on things like minced meat.

What about all the other foods like loose fruit or vegetables? You’ll find out in the next post