• Question: What food has the most calories and which food has the least calories?

    Asked by marshy007 to Duncan, Grant, Julie, Nik, Rachel on 11 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Grant Campbell

      Grant Campbell answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      @marshy007. Food is mostly made of fat, protein, carbohydrates and water. Fat (or oil) has, on average, about 9 calories per gram, protein and carbohydrate about 4 calories per gram, and water none! So, fat has more than twice as many calories as the other main food components, and high fat foods have the most calories – things like butter, cream and anything fried. Foods with lots of water are lower in calories.

      Some of the interesting science being done at the moment is to put water into food in a way that mimics the behaviour of fat, in order to give the nice mouthfeel that fat gives, but with lower calories. One way is to create little water droplets that are surrounded by special molecules that keep them as droplets.

      If you look on a nutrition label, you can find out how many grams there are of protein, fat and carbohydrate in the food per 100 g in total (the rest is mostly water). Multiplying the number of g of each by the numbers of calories for each, and adding them up, will give an estimate of the total number of calories per 100 g of food, which you can compare with the answer given on the label.

      Hope this helps you choose lower calorie foods! And drink plenty of water – it’s good for you, but doesn’t make you put on weight. (There is some research that suggests students who drink plenty of water do better in exams. Worth a try, don’t you think?)

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