Do you want to know how nutritionists find out how many calories are in food? So prepare the calculator and follow the step by step.
If you want to lose weight or gain weight, or even if you are satisfied with your weight, at some point in your life you will discover how many calories food contains, which is something very important in your diet.
Food calories determine how much energy you are providing your body every time you eat. For example, a spoonful of regular margarine has 60 calories, while the same measure of light margarine has 29 calories.
And finding out how many calories food contains is not only of interest to those who need to lose weight or control their weight in some way. Knowing the nutritional and energy value of food directly influences health and that is why this is such an important subject.
So, keep in mind: if you want to go on any type of diet, look for a nutritionist.
How to find out how many calories food contains?
But, back to the subject, how do people find out how many calories food contains? Is there a calculation to know this kind of thing?
For those who don’t know, the professionals responsible for calculating and discovering food calories are nutritionists. They follow a calculation that takes into account the food group of the food being evaluated, such as whether it is protein, carbohydrate, lipid and so on.
However, the first thing to take into consideration are the portions and measurements that will be calculated, which tend to vary according to the specificity of the product. It can be grams, fraction, slice, round, spoon, unit and so on.
When it comes to lay people, like you and me (if you are not a professional in the field), what usually prevails in diets are homemade measures. In this case, conventional measurements, such as grams and milliliters; They are converted into measurements that can be measured at home, such as cup, tablespoon, flat plate, deep plate and so on.
Calculating the energy value
When finding out how many calories a food contains, what nutritionists do is list the ingredients used in the recipe or identify what type of food it is and do the math taking into account pre-established values for each food group.
Carbohydrate: 4 kcal (or 17 kJ)
Protein: 4 kcal (or 17 kJ)
Fat: 9 kcal (or 37 kJ)
In the case of a cake, for example, for every 100 grams of flour, we have 77.7 grams of carbohydrate. Therefore, in 14.117 grams of flour there are 10.96 grams of carbohydrate.
And so follows the calculation with the other ingredients used in the preparation. In the end, just add everything up to find out the total calories of the recipe and, of course, divide it into portions to find out how many calories it will have per portion, spoon and so on.
The “weight” of daily consumption in the calculations
Now, if you are trying to find out how much of each food group a particular food offers, the calculation is done using percentages. This is how you can prove, for example, that the same piece of cake we just mentioned is rich in carbohydrates and not in proteins, you know?
To arrive at this type of energy and nutritional value, you need to take into account the daily total of the diet or the daily total of the food groups.
Therefore, to know the percentage of carbohydrates or proteins in a food, you will need to calculate the total of the food group under investigation and check how much this corresponds in percentage to the daily total presented in the table.
Energy value (calories): 2000
Proteins: 75 grams
Total Fat: 55 grams
Saturated Fats: 22 grams
Carbohydrates: 300 grams
Fibers: 25 grams
Sodium: 2400 milligrams
TACO table
Of course, for those who haven’t studied nutrition, this seems (and must be) a very complicated task. However, as we said at the beginning, nutritionists are the ones who should worry about finding out the calories in food, because counting calories isn’t good for anyone!
But, to help you with your diet or to satisfy your curiosity, there is a ready-made table. It has a huge amount of food that we consume daily in Brazil with calories already calculated (using 100-gram portions as a reference).
Known as the Food Composition Table or, simply, the TACO table, this list is beyond complete. In fact, it was prepared by Unicamp and is one of the most complete and recommended today.
So, did you satisfy your curiosity? Now, talking about the amount of calories we “send in” every day, this other article will make you smile from ear to ear: 30 foods with negative calories to eat as much as you want without gaining weight.
