Dieting in Europe

Nutritional labels are different in Europe than those in the States. Unlike U.S. labels, which break down the calories per tablespoon, ounce or serving of something (although I often take umbrage with what measly amounts are 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 tub of butter might be 200 grams). So I've had to learn to do things differently when it comes to counting calories every day.

Here's a lunch-time attempt at calorie counting:

A bottle of salad dressing 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 that it is a one-to-one ratio. So I multiplied 302 by 2.5, to come up with 755 = the bottle contains 755 calories total.

I usually measure out dressing 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 flour or powdered sugar.

Therefore I Internet 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 250 by 13.65 grams, which gave me the result of 18.13 -- roughly 18 tablespoons per bottle. Then I divide 755 by 18 = 41 calories per tablespoon.

I wonder how many calories I burned just trying to figure that out.