Monday, November 28, 2016

The caloric low down on a serving of Spaghetti with meat sauce!



Whenever I set myself down to a plate of spaghetti with a meat sauce at lunchtime, I've often wondered just what the caloric impact is for a given serving!

Here are the averaged figures I came up with:

Spaghetti pasta = 3.6 cal per gram (based on using American Beauty spaghetti panel information)
Pasta meat sauce = 3.3 cal per gram (based on my research post)

So, the first task was for me to decide what size of a serving made any sense! As I have been on a diet for what seems forever, I'd long ago estimated that the average tri-meal caloric content I needed to hit was about 500. (That was an averaged figure that would work out to 1500 calories a day, leaving me a few hundred to use for snacks). Eighteen hundred calories was, in reality, a top limit for a male over the age of 60. At least for one who wanted to lose a few pounds a month.

OK, now assuming the meal would consist of only the pasta and sauce, I wondered what a 500 calorie deal would look like? OK. Let's assume I went for 100 grams of pasta. That would equate to 360 calories right there. Now, to be under that 500 mark, I could therefore apply about 40 grams of sauce (or 132 calories) for a grand total of 492 calories for the entire meal-a-deal! This seemed a livable portion. Note: One of the fun things to do on any diet is to cheat! (Something I do quite often)! I therefore added a slice of garlic toast and found myself in culinary heaven! what a great lunch! Then, I started to wonder about what I was going to have for dinner....

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