What Is Really Included in the Calorie Content of Food (and What Is Not)
Counting calories with a tracking app seems pretty easy, unless you decide to get serious about it and measure portion sizes. Then you’ll realize that an orange weighs less without the skin, that skinning a baked chicken will save you some calories, and that there’s an entry for bone-in chicken thighs, but you’re not going to eat the bone. So how many calories are you actually eating?
These are good questions, and the USDA (which does a lot of nutrient testing) has the answers. When you search for a basic product like “apple” or “chicken breast” on a food tracking app, you’ll find records from USDA testing. (If you’re using MyFitnessPal, which I don’t think you should be doing, the green flag options usually have a USDA entry.)
Are peels and bones included in generic food calorie information?
Often there will be separate entries for foodstuffs with and without their skins, skins and other commonly discarded items. But if you only see one entry, here ‘s a rule of thumb for you:
Portions are provided… for non-waste edible material (i.e., the edible part of the food), such as an apple without a core or stalk, or a boneless chicken leg.
Thus, the nutritional information for oranges is only for the flesh, without the rind and rind. The rind is technically edible, but is considered offal for this item. If you want to eat the peel anyway — let’s say you’re making candied orange slices — there’s an entry for raw oranges with the peel , and a separate entry for orange peel only.
Sometimes you can get more information by looking up the food of your choice in the USDA FoodDataCentral and clicking on the “measures” or “ingredients” for the food. For example, chicken backs include meat and skin, but no bones, and are considered salty. Bananas are peeled .
For more information on what is considered “waste” or the “inedible part” of food, you’ll have to dig deeper into obscure government websites. I don’t expect you to do this every time you eat a chicken thigh, but here are some examples of what I found in the FOOD_DES file for the Standard Reference (Legacy) database (don’t ask):
- Grapefruit does not include “peel, seed, core and membrane”.
- The KFC drumstick does not include “cartilage and bones” (there are separate records for whether you eat it whole or with the skin and breading).
- Porterhouse steak contains no “bones and connective tissue” but does include a layer of fat on the outside. There are separate entries for porterhouse steaks with the fat trimmed to 1/8 inch or completely removed.
- Pot roasts do not include “connective tissue” or “suture fat”.
So here is your answer for generic products. If you want to weigh a banana, do it without the peel.
What is on the nutrition label of packaged foods?
On the other hand, if you’re looking at a packaged product, you might have the opposite question: Does the label list the calories for everything you’ll be eating, or just what’s in the package? For example, if you’re buying a seasoned rice mix, the instructions might tell you to add oil while it’s cooking.
The Food and Drug Administration requires packaged foods to contain nutritional information about everything in the package, i.e. the dry rice mix itself. They may also optionally include a second column for products “as prepared”. You will most often see this for baking mixes (one column for mix, one for cake slice) and for cereal (cereal by itself and cereal served with a specific amount and type of milk).