Calories...Fresh vs Frozen?

[fitjannow]

Hi,  I'm wondering if there is a reason why frozen green string beans have 70 cals per cup and just grean string beans have only 34cals per cup???  Confused.

[AuroraKat]

There's no difference calorie-wise between frozen and fresh veggies, assuming that the frozen veggie doesn't have other ingredients that would alter the calorie content. A cup is very imprecise unit of measurement for many types of food - you can pack beans very loosely into a cup, or you can really compact them. This would result in more beans in the compacted cup and thus more calories. I recommend weighing foods for more accurate calorie calculations. 

[fitjannow]

Thanks for your reply. I am not to exact on the calories thing. I am
still at a loss as to why the calorie count is so different on the Fitbit
food log. I mean more than twice the calories for frozen!

[Dominique]

I agree with @AuroraKat: for nutrition, grams (and a kitchen scale!) rule.

As to fresh vs. frozen, there shouldn’t be a difference. Nothing like fresh/frozen (for raw ingredients like vegetable) vs. canned. 

[AuroraKat]

@fitjannow are you looking up frozen beans via the Fitbit food database? Have you tried changing the units of measure to grams to see if you get similar results to the fresh beans? A cup is just a very inexact quantity. 

It is also possible that the Fitbit database for that particular food is wrong. It happened to me a few times when I scanned a barcode from the food I wanted to log. One time, a completely different food was shown and another, the nutritional information was different from the label on the food. 

Check out this link for calorie information:

https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/

It's very thorough and provides information for various units of measure at the same time for comparison. 

[fitjannow]

Thanks. That was very useful info. I will try the grams option.

Cheers.

[LanuzaFitbit]

Hey @AuroraKat! Hope you're doing great. I was just reading around and I found your post about the calories, cups and grams. Very interesting! Thanks for sharing it. I know it doesn't seem like a lot, but it can be really helpful.