Cooked vs raw in the foods database
 

I know that cooking can change the calories gained from a food, but I'm not sure what is being taken into account in the foods database when you can select either cooked or raw for a particular food.

For example, when I search "potatoes, red", I can select

"potatoes, red, flesh and skin, baked" which shows 89 cal per 100g

or

"potatoes, red, flesh and skin, raw" which shows 70 cal per 100g.

Are the extra cals in the baked option simply from the cooking, or does "baked" assume the cook is using a certain amount of oil?

This question generalizes to all types of cooking in the database: fried, baked, broiled, etc... Does the database assume cooking processes add outside calories to the food (from butter, oil, etc) ?

Thanks,
Kate

good question..i don't have the answer but I am also curious.

I can see the answer going either direction, esp if they are assuming you didn't cook it yourself and maybe the restaurant added on 19 cals?

Or maybe bc it gets baked then some of the water is evaporated in the oven and it becomes denser, and therefore higher cals?

For my understanding is that: if you take 100g of raw potato and bake it. After baking, the cooked potato will weigh less than 100g (the weigh change during the cooking process). So 4oz of raw meat, after cook it's still have the same calories but its weigh has changed. Is it make sense?

I think it's safe to say that any "non-raw" food takes into account fat added in cooking. If you want to be most accurate, call it "raw" and add your own calories for your cooking method (if any).

If I fry an egg using cooking spray, I call it "raw" instead of "fried" which would add calories for extra fat, for example.

Regards,
Michael

Thanks for all the replies everyone.

A couple people have suggested along these lines:

I've been trying to do this, but I'm curious about the way cooking affects the calories I get from the food. I'm guessing that a cooked potato might be easier to digest, and release more calories into my body than a raw potato. Or perhaps, a raw potato might be harder to digest and thus take more calories to digest, and so the calories I net from the potato might be less than if cooked.

Does anyone know if I need to be concerned with this? Can cooking change the caloric intake from a food significantly?

At any rate, you all have given me some insight as to why the cooked and raw numbers vary in the database. Much appreciated.

Thanks,
Kate

Because heat changes the structure of potato starch which is less digestible in a raw state.
Human digestive cannot digest some of those raw starch present in potato tissue.
Do you know that humans cannot digest fiber because we cannot digest cellulose , which means fibers contain 0 calories, but animals like gorilla can extract a huge amount of calories from them, they can eat paper, harsh plant, because they have a specialized digestive system.

To try and help answer your question.. Today I selected Broccoli cooked, and I realized that there were 3 grams of fat added to it. I couldn't understand why fat would be added to plainly cooked broccoli, so I looked at the other selections. I found Broccoli cooked, fat added in cooking, and Broccoli cooked, fat not added in cooking. I chose the fat not added, and it gave the calories which I felt were correct. I then compared it to other sites I found in google and it seems to add up. So, I think Fitday automatically adds fat or oil unless it states otherwise.

I think Crimpet's got it right, Kate. It doesn't always work, but to get what I think is the more accurate number, I always enter "broccoli, cooked, fat not added" for example, and then add "butter" and choose "1 pat" from the popup if that's what I used.
Fish, poultry and meat might be a little different, I think, because you could be cooking off fats, etc., and that would really change the numbers... I like it when I see "meat, cooked yields ...." I'm assuming that I can plug in the raw weight and get the numbers for my cooked turkey burger, for example. (might be wrong on this tho...)
Pete

Hi Kate, I have been here since early Jan and had the same questions when I started, nearly everyone does. I was told by either Mike or Micheal that "foods cooked" in the computer assumes people are adding oil. I just entered broccoli raw then added a pat of butter, as someone else already suggested. I now simmer my broccoli in chicken bouillon (OXO or Knorr come to mind) and even my broccoli hating husband gobbles it up! Lol. It is about 10cal for the stock, if that, but instead of fiddling with it I just leave it, everything else is documented to the tee.;)

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