Here is what bothers me… I have a piece of turkey breast which weighs 900 grams. I grill it and grilled it weighs only 550 grams.
What i do is i divide 900 by 550 to see how much smaller it became and then multiply nutriotion facts of the turkey by that number, because i think that it is the water which came out from the turkey, so each gram of it is more saturated with macronutrients.
For example, raw turkey has the following:
Cals - 111, fat - 0,7, protein - 24,6
If i multuply each of these by 900/550=1,7, then i have the following:
cals 188, fat 1,18, protein - 41
Here is what bothers me… I have a piece of turkey breast which weighs 900 grams. I grill it and grilled it weighs only 550 grams.
What i do is i divide 900 by 550 to see how much smaller it became and then multiply nutriotion facts of the turkey by that number, because i think that it is the water which came out from the turkey, so each gram of it is more saturated with macronutrients.
For example, raw turkey has the following:
Cals - 111, fat - 0,7, protein - 24,6
If i multuply each of these by 900/550=1,7, then i have the following:
cals 188, fat 1,18, protein - 41
Is it correct?
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Nah man, I dont think thats correct, I dont know what the formula is but food wouldn’t nearly double its protein content just by cooking it, and the fat definitely wouldn’t go up!
To determine the difference in weight you would not divide, you would subtract the weight after the food has been cooked from the weight before it was cooked. What you did was partition 900g of raw turkey into 1.7 groups of 550g of cooked turkey, therefore you didn’t find the difference, you found, in other words, how many times 550 goes into 900.
I’m under the idea that the Nutrition Facts label displays the serving size of a food in its uncooked form but shows the amount of macro-nutrients delivered in the food’s cooked form.
But if my understanding of the Nutrition label is incorrect then, in order to find the macro-nutrient totals after the food has been cooked you should approach the problem using ratios, for example:
To determine FAT content:
(0.7g of fat / 900g of Raw Turkey) = (X / 550g of Cooked Turkey) ----->
((0.7g of fat * 550g of Cooked Turkey) / (900g of Raw Turkey)) = X ----->
(385g of fat,Turkey) / (900g of Turkey) = X
.43g of fat = X
Therefore, 550g of Cooked Turkey contains .43g of Fat. By applying the same approach to protein content you arrive at the amount of 15g of Protein for 550g of Cooked Turkey.
For the most part, cooking food isnt gonna make a difference in your calorie counts nor your long term physique goals. Subtracting numbers just because you cooked your turkey is a little overboard.
The weight changes because a lot of the water in the meat cooks off, but the protein content stays the same. So an 8oz portion of raw hamburger has 46 grams of protein, which equals 5.75 grams of protein per ounce. If that 8oz portion of raw meat cooks down to 6oz, it doesn’t lose any protein, it had just become more concentrated so it has 7.66 grams of protein per ounce.
Some of the fat in raw hamburger will run off as it cooks, so that’s harder to calculate. A tablespoon of any kind of oil or grease is 14grams of fat. So you could cook a pound of hamburger, scrape up all the grease in the pan and measure it, if you wanted to be anal about it.
PanchoPantera, technically you are right, but i think that Uncle Gabby is more precise here - it is mostly water and some fat also goes off. So, in case of turkey, it becomes more protein dense.
GetSwole,
So, what you are saying is, when turkey becomes 1.7 times lighter, it still has the same amount of protein and fat per gram of weight? I doubt that protein and fat goes off the same as water does.
Yes, I’m saying it’s the water. Having worked in a supermarket deli I can attest to the amount of water that is put into most lunch meats. This carries into fowl in general. It is usually pumped up some with water not to mention just the natural fluids and fats which will burn off for the most part. The macronutrients are very likely the same or pretty close
I think i misunderstood you. What you are saying, is that after cooking a lot of water comes off the and since macronutrients do not come off (except for fat), the density per gra, of weight is increasing. Right?
Most calorie tables list calories for foods raw and cooked - just use the right value.
I personally know when I cook 5 oz. turkey it becomes 3.5…but I bet if someone else cooked it it might come out different (depends on how dry it gets). So if you really want to be super precise probably going with the raw numbers is better, but again it makes very little difference…the values for cooked foods are pretty close too.
Yes thats what I’m saying Zluke. Its just water pretty much draining off. You nutrient values which technically be more dense because the food weighs less but its because of water evaporation not because of the nutrients burning off.
The reason why i started caring about it is because when i bought a kilogram of frozen fish, cooked it and saw that it became only 350 grams. **ckers add extra water in the packs, plus the water which is contained in the fish itself. What i do with fish is i open up the pack, defreeze it, weigh it, cook it and then weigh again.
sarah1,
i agree that depending on how you cook weight change varies. If i boil things, then it loses less weight. If i grill it - it loses lots of weight.
I am sure, that protein stays the same as in raw food, only becomes more dense. What about fat? Does anyone knows how much of it cooks off?
The change in fat content during cooking varies. It depends on the type and cut of meat and cooking method involved.
Your turkey breast example had very little fat to begin with; you can assume it’s all still there after cooking.
If you cook poultry with skin, a lot of fat is in the skin and renders (i.e., melts off) during cooking. The 12-pound Butterball turkey I cooked at Thanksgiving rendered about 12 fl. oz. (24 tablespoons) of fat. You will see the rendered fat in the pan (unless you burn it away, in which case it will cause a lot of smoke); it doesn’t evaporate like water does. Same with ground beef, as Uncle Gabby pointed out. And a ton of fat gets rendered from bacon.
He also pointed out the only way to figure out how much fat was lost is to measure it. Of course, if you grill a fatty steak like a rib eye, some fat will drain down into the grill and possibly cause flareups. You have no way whatsoever of knowing how much fat you lost if it drained into a grill or burned off.
The fiber in vegetables doesn’t go anywhere during the cooking process. Like meat, vegetables lose water content when cooked, especially by dry heat methods such as sauteeing. Fiber is the structural matter of the vegetable and does not evaporate or disappear with cooking.
Vegetables do generally become more digestible when cooked, or at least more calories become more quickly available. The fiber isn’t “degraded” (fiber is not digestible and therefore contains no calories anyway); but the vegetable becomes softer and easier to break down. The form of prep matters too.
This is pretty intuitive; your body can extract more calories more easily from cooked, pureed carrots than from crunching on raw ones, for example. This is why babies are fed cooked, pureed foods for their immature digestive systems. Cooking softens the carrot enough to puree, and pureeing increases the surface area, so the starches and sugars are more quickly and easily broken down.
I cooked a pound of 85/15 hamburger once and measured the fat, I forget what the exact numbers were but the rule of thumb I came up with was that 1/3 of the fat calories from frying hamburger was left in the pan. But that was just a round estimate.
If you are on a precise diet, you should probably take accurate measurements on several different occaisions to get better numbers. And if you do, please share.
andersons, thanks a lot for this great piece of info!
Uncle Gabby,
Since i grill chicken/turkey in the microwave’s grill/convection - it is easy to measure the melted fat. Will post info after next cooking (i do it in a batch).
Here is what bothers me… I have a piece of turkey breast which weighs 900 grams. I grill it and grilled it weighs only 550 grams.
What i do is i divide 900 by 550 to see how much smaller it became and then multiply nutriotion facts of the turkey by that number, because i think that it is the water which came out from the turkey, so each gram of it is more saturated with macronutrients.
For example, raw turkey has the following:
Cals - 111, fat - 0,7, protein - 24,6
If i multuply each of these by 900/550=1,7, then i have the following:
cals 188, fat 1,18, protein - 41
Is it correct?
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If you weighed it once, you have a good idea whats in it (all published values are approx or average) so why weigh it again.
But yes cooked turkey has more protein, fat, energy PER 100g than does raw PER 100g. Like you said its effectively more concentrated.
Obviously if the turkey weighed 900 g raw it would have the same protein content after cooking (unless you burned it!) You don’t need to rewiegh. If you want to weigh cooked just look up the values for cooked turkey (I think you’ll find they’re pretty near your own “experimental results”
