Weezl and friends Phase 2 -giving it a whirl for Shirl! Testing meal plan for a month

aless02

HowlinWolf wrote: »

look on a couple of bodybuilding websites, going by my googling they have formulas for converting one into the other

yeah I found some formulas, but they were soooooooooo complicated it hurt my eyes.

So that's 113.4mg potassium from an original 100g raw rice. Then rice loses very little potassium in cooking, as the raw figure was 115! :T So maybe it's not as bad as we thought or we just got lucky with rice .

SusanC_2

aless02 wrote: »

yeah I found some formulae, but they were soooooooooo complicated it hurt my eyes.

So that's 113.4mg potassium from an original 100g raw rice. Then rice loses very little potassium in cooking, as the raw figure was 115! :T So maybe it's not as bad as we thought or we just got lucky with rice .

It probably also depends on method of cooking. Once when I was in hospital, the lady in the next bed had to go on a low potassium diet and felt the need to tell me all about the guidelines she'd been given. She was told not to steam her veg but to boil it and to throw away the cooking water (rather than using it in the gravy) to help minimise the potassium she got.

HowlinWolf

Okay, I think it's taking 100g raw weight then cooking and working out the values. So 100g (raw weight) white spaghetti boiled in water has 0.02mg of vitamin b6 wheras the same spaghetti had 0.17mg of vitamin b6 before you cooked it

domesticgoddess789

I very much wish I could help out with this latest dilemma but I am so bad with numbers and formuale (is this the plural?!) and I'm not even sure I understand what you are trying to work out :eek:

But please know my thoughts are with you, my super clever mathsy friends, and that I have my fingers tightly crossed that you work through this soon!

polkadot

Goodness me-that'll teach me to disumpear for two hours when I said one...and this my first night on the job :eek:

I was just talking about this to DH and he was saying if you want to look at all these variables-it would be hard to manage it all in excel.
It would depend on the cooking method as well as the ingredient...and as someone commented earlier, it will all balance itself out at the end of the meal.

When I was doing weight watchers, they advise you to do all your recipes based on raw weight...because again as someone pointed out-100g called for in the recipe is still going to be 100g, no matter how it increases or reduces in the cooking process.

Weezl would you like me to add cooked weight in that spreadsheet I sent you for the Vit C?

System

This link gives the USDA calculations for the retention of nutrients during cooking processes, according to type of food and cooking method:
http://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/retn/retn06.pdf

If you factor in these percentages to your nutrition calculations for the raw data, your results should be as accurate as is feasible to hope for. No need to cook things and measure them, when the data already exists and has been vetted for validity!

twinkle_star_2

Avocet wrote: »

This link gives the USDA calculations for the retention of nutrients during cooking processes, according to type of food and cooking method:
http://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/retn/retn06.pdf

If you factor in these percentages to your nutrition calculations for the raw data, your results should be as accurate as is feasible to hope for. No need to cook things and measure them, when the data already exists and has been vetted for validity!

Oh this is good. This is very very good. It has maths which, shocking even myself, I understand.

Becasue it calculates percentages of nutrients after cooking (and specifies cooking methods) you don't need to weigh everything - just do maths. And we all know how much we like maths :rotfl:

Allegra

Okay, it's not needed anymore, but just in case anyone wanted to know, 100g dried pasta becomes 320 cooked, 100g dried chickpeas equals 240 cooked

I have to add though that I would imagine that the weight would vary according to how long things were cooked - I do pasta "al dente" which means that it'll weight less than the pasta of someone who likes it all soft and mushy; and chickpeas are cooked until almost falling apart, which means that if you do them just until before they lose their crunch, they will weigh less Clear as mud, nah ?

Lesley_Gaye

Weezl

the s'sheet uses raw weight, the weight of the ingred as it comes from the supermarket

I can't see at the moment how any cals or fat would be affected by cooking. If you cooked something with fat in it, then didn't use the cooking water/liquid, yes, the fat would dissolve into the liquid and reduce the amount of cals, but otherwise, how would it affect the cals? Genuine puzzlement, not being in your face about it

Cooked carrot, for example, is fewer cals per 100g when cooked because it has absorbed some water. But Shirl will be using, and weighing, 80g pp of raw carrot, so does it matter that the cooked carrot weighs more? Raw carrot has 10 more cals per 100g than cooked, and according to Collins Calorie Counter, it is the carb that has decreased, so it is prob sugar that has leached into the water

As for vits and mins, that is more tricky. Do govt websites use cooked or raw I wonder, I suspect raw because the cooking method has the most impact on vits and mins, followed by storage method and age of item.

In this article I just happened to know of in New Scientist - here , looking at broccoli - it explains how microwaving destroys just about all the antioxidants such as flavonoids and steaming the least. So how is it feasible to allow for a range of 5%-90% of flavonoids being destroyed? I don't think it is.

If Govt websites give an rda of vits and mins, which they do, without reference to cooking, surely it is just as valid for us to do so.

If we try to ensure Shirley actually ingests the rda of all vits and mins I think we are on to a loser, the variables are just too huge. Take carrots for example. They could be spanky fresh from the garden, or old, soft and wobbly, end of season, woody ones. They could be grated and eaten raw in a salad, or cooked to within an inch of their life. They could be gently steamed or microwaved to a mush. All of which hugely affects how much vits and mins there are in the eaten food.

I think we need to include advice on best methods of cooking for vit / min retention and leave it at that

Or am I missing something here?

weezl74

Hello all, so lovely to have all the responses.

Right, I'll summarise where we've got to:

I think that shirley's published information is safe since as has been pointed out there isn't a loss of fat content/ calorie value when cooked.

We've allowed for possible loss of the omegas through heating already.

Calcium is overprovisioned by 45% so since no cooking method destroys anything like this amount, we are safe.

These as far as I'm aware are the only things we've said on the website which last night called into question, so that's great.