Nutritional labels are different in Europe than ours in the States. Unlike ours, which break down the calories per tablespoon, ounce or serving of something (although I often take umbrage with what is considered a serving), the labels in Europe tell you how many calories you would eat if you ate 100 grams of something.
Well, nobody eats 100 grams of butter or 100 grams of salad dressing (i.e. a package of butter might only be 200 grams). So I've had to learn to do things differently.
Here's a typical lunchtime attempt at calorie counting.
Visiting a grocery store this week, I found a rare bottle of Dijon dressing, one of my favorites. So I bought it and decided to enjoy a nice big salad. The bottle contains 250 milliliters of dressing, but the label says that there are 302 calories in 100 grams of dressing.
How many milliliters are in a gram?
I learned through a Google search they are the same. So I multiplied 302 by 2.5, to come up with 755 = the bottle contains 755 calories total. Now, I usually measure out dressing on my salad in tablespoons, so I needed to figure out how many calories are in one tablespoon.
The tricky thing is that a tablespoon measures volume whereas grams measure weight. A tablespoon of something thick and heavy will be more grams than a tablespoon of something light, like feathers or powdered sugar.
Therefore I searched how much a tablespoon of salad dressing would weigh. I couldn't find it, but found the weight of a tablespoon of oil -- 13.65 grams.
Next, I divided 755 by 13.65 = 55. This means that each tablespoon of salad dressing contains roughly 55 calories.
I wonder how many calories I burned just trying to figure that out.
No comments:
Post a Comment