97
votes
Accepted
What constitutes the majority of meat?
It's essentially just water.
You can directly see this in the full USDA nutrition facts (link is for "Chicken, broilers or fryers, breast, meat only, cooked, roasted"). Per 100g, there is 65.26g of ...
- 58.4k
60
votes
Accepted
How Can Cooked Meat Still Have Protein Value?
Structural proteins in foods, i.e. albumin in eggs, myosin in muscle meats, gluten in wheat, are formed by amino acids in complex structures. Proteins are folded and clumped chains of peptides, and ...
- 5,361
38
votes
Accepted
Why should (or shouldn't) we wash rice before cooking?
Reasons to wash your rice:
Reduce/Control Starch levels
Often when you're cooking rice you want distinct grains of rice and for your rice to have texture. In the case of Chinese fried rice for ...
- 11.2k
37
votes
How can I determine whether a food or ingredient is "ultraprocessed"?
You can't, for the simple reason that "ultraprocessed" is not a technical term with a scientific definition. It is, instead, a hyperbolic term used to make articles sound more frightening ...
- 65.5k
36
votes
Accepted
What does the ash content of broken wheat really mean?
The "Ash" is not an ingredient in the flour
To be clear, the "Ash" is a measure of what you'd get left - if you burned the flour. It is not an ingredient in the bag of flour.
More specifically if ...
- 804
28
votes
How Can Cooked Meat Still Have Protein Value?
The denaturing of proteins refers to their physical structure, not their nutritional value. This might help. As is detailed in the link, heat, acid, salt, alcohol, and mechanical agitation can cause ...
- 77.1k
25
votes
Accepted
Do tea filter bags filter out vitamins and minerals?
Nutrients are microscopic, the pores in tea bags are far too large to act as a filter. However, tea bags will absorb a very small amount of liquid, and in that liquid there will nutrients, sugars, ...
- 77.2k
20
votes
Accepted
Why does processed meat contain preservatives, while canned fish needs not?
These are two different ways to preserve food.
The canned salmon was boiled and then sealed into a can while it was still boiling sealed into a can and boiled under a specified combination of time ...
- 316
14
votes
Accepted
Why do some products have different nutritional composition stated on different containers, even when accounting for serving size?
I can only guess at it needs to be a different recipe for the can compared to the bottle.
The ingredients list, though not hugely helpful, lists tea-extract at 0.3% on one pack & 0.32% on the ...
- 29.9k
12
votes
Accepted
Calories in (cooked) pasta
The best way to be confident is to check some clear nutrition facts directly.
The USDA reports that "Pasta, dry, unenriched" has 371 calories per 100g, and "Pasta, cooked, unenriched, ...
- 58.4k
12
votes
Why does processed meat contain preservatives, while canned fish needs not?
Canned salmon is sterilized. Sterilization uses heat to render a product safe. Cured hams are preserved with salt, and nitrites in some cases. Some hams are also cooked. Furthermore, some fish is ...
- 77.1k
11
votes
Why should (or shouldn't) we wash rice before cooking?
For Japanese (like me), our white rice is always thoroughly washed in cold water until the water runs clear. Steamed white rice is at the very core of most of our diets, and we take it really ...
10
votes
Accepted
Is cooking with an air fryer similar, nutritionally, to baking?
Using an air fryer without oil is essentially the same thing as using a convection oven. This would make it no more and no less fatty than baking. If you use oil in the air fryer then my understanding ...
- 3,012
10
votes
Why should (or shouldn't) we wash rice before cooking?
Most white rice produced in the US is thoroughly washed then fortified. So, Americans don't usually wash white rice. It's fine if you do, though. Rice imported from other countries may not be either ...
- 58.7k
10
votes
Accepted
What's the brix of a typical avocado?
The basic definition of Brix is grams sugar per 100 g solution. For an avocado, the FDA’s nutrition data says that’s 8.5 °Bx.
The Brix scale is generally applied to solutions consisting mostly of ...
- 30.4k
8
votes
Does caramelizing increase the amount of sugar in a dish?
While rumtscho's answer is literally correct, the word "caramelization" when applied to onions includes lots of things other than literal caramelization. Yes, actual chemical caramelization turns ...
- 33.2k
8
votes
How can I determine whether a food or ingredient is "ultraprocessed"?
Ironically, table 1 of the paper FuzzyChef referenced provides a list of definitions. The definitions from 2014 onward do contain actionable information you can use to try and determine whether a ...
- 189
7
votes
Accepted
How do the nutritional values of bananas change as they ripen?
Starch content and sweetness:
Bananas become sweeter as they ripen because the starch is broken down. An unripe banana is full of complex carbohydrates, but as it ripens, these are broken down into ...
- 367
7
votes
Does caramelizing increase the amount of sugar in a dish?
No, neither caramelization (which is the same as pyrolysis in this context), nor the Maillard reaction increase the sugar content of onions. They actually decrease it a bit.
Caramelization/pyrolisis ...
- 140k
7
votes
Accepted
Why is the nutrition information for these two items so different?
You are comparing (100 g of custard made with some of this powder and some milk) to (100g of this powder) -- ignoring the salt, anyway.
The magic words are
As prepared with semi-skimmed milk
That's ...
- 11.6k
7
votes
How Can Cooked Meat Still Have Protein Value?
Another way to think about proteins and tissue is like lego blocks. Imagine the tissue or steak you eat is a well-crafted lego structure, for example a building. Heating it might break apart some of ...
- 71
7
votes
Are beef calories for uncooked or cooked meat?
If they really don't tell you whether it is for cooked or uncooked, then you indeed can't know it.
I would be rather surprised at finding such unlabeled data though. It is rare, and if you, for some ...
- 140k
6
votes
How can components of a packaged food item exceed the net weight?
As Zanna said, you can't just add all the values together, some items are a fraction of others.
In this case, "total carbohydrates" already includes the "sugar" and "dietary fibre" items, so the total ...
- 1,157
6
votes
Accepted
How does cooking food changes its content of carbohydrates and sugar?
This is a rather general question, and I will try to answer it in a general manner.
First, the total amount of carbohydrates will not change, or maybe there will be a neglible reduction due to ...
- 140k
6
votes
Wrong ingredient order for dried cranberries?
The ingredients reference the, well, ingredients. They are listed in the order of what goes into the product. So, they start out with more cranberries than sugar.
The nutrition information references ...
- 140k
5
votes
Can I use fresh okara without cooking it?
If you made soy milk in a soy milk maker, the okara isn’t raw, it’s cooked. But if you made it in a blender before boiling the beans, and then cooked the milk on the stovetop, then the okara really ...
- 51
5
votes
Why put a stone in the soup?
During the depression, they used to put a porous stone in the pot when they made soup. The stone would hold the flavor of the soup. Then, when soup ingredients were hard to find, they would boil ...
5
votes
How is bean pasta so protein-rich?
I can see three possibilities, though I don't know which is the actual case.
First, it is simply possible that the beans they source are, for some reason, very high in protein. The general ...
- 11.8k
5
votes
Does the nutrition facts label include "packaging"?
In the UK, the nutition information (for tinned fish) is given after draining: Tesco sardines. This is specified on the packaging.
How well drained is another matter, but there's enough information ...
- 45.3k
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