How to Accurately Track Cooking Sprays

Wednesday, Jul 28, 2021 | Lifestyle

Hi all! Coach Lisa here! 

We often talk about groceries, cooking, baking and even planning. What we don’t talk about often enough, is that all of those actions usually call for an oil, butter, or spray of some sort. The unfortunate truth is that those items are hardly zero BITES (wishful thinking- right??). Here’s my best attempt at categorizing and scoring some of the most common cooking sprays. 

As far as BITES go…oil is oil. They are all almost the same – 4 BITES/ tbsp. There may be a very small variance if you had decimals on (possibly 0.2) but in general it isn’t much. 

Then it comes down to usage and taste preferences – certain oils are meant to be used predominantly cold, some are better for low heat dishes and others are designed for deep frying or higher heats. HERE is a great article to clarify the differences.

These products are typically marketed as 0 calories, but they are only 0 calories at certain amounts. Cooking sprays are 1/4 sec burst – 1/4 sec. Do you know how short that is!? Further research tells us that at a certain number of seconds, or a certain number of sprays, calories and fat are:

I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT BUTTER SPRAY

  • 6 sprays = 5 cal + 0.5 fat

PARKAY SPRAY

  • 5 sprays = 4 cal + 0.4 fat

PAM COOKING SPRAY

  • 1 sec spray = 6 cal + 0.6 fat + 0.3 carb

Pressurized cooking sprays (like Pam) are zero BITES for up to 2 seconds of a hold. If you use a pump sprayer with your own oil, it is zero BITES for up to 8 pumps. After that the pumps will be counted. When you scan the bottle or search, they are loaded as 0.0 calories, as that’s how they are loaded against the UPC by the manufacturer. That means it will always show as 0…but it’s not.

If you want to be sure you are tracking this accurately and you tend to be a little heavy handed with them, (hey it happens to the best of us!) it might be worth editing your entry. Hungry Girl figured out that 1 bottle of ICBINB contains 900 calories and 90g fat! It’s not free…

If you decide you want to edit

EDITING MEASUREMENTS OR NUTRITIONAL DATA

  • Tap to open the item from a scan, My Foods or Favorites (you cannot do this from your tracking screen or Recipes at the moment)
  • Tap the […] in the top right corner
  • Tap EDIT
  • Edit anything you need – serving size, nutritional values, measurements – just be sure you are keeping them in line with the information on the label.
  • Tap the 💟 to save to Favorites for quickly finding it later (*optional)
  • Tap SAVE

I hope this helps! Find more info at the links below!

Video Tutorial here:

https://youtu.be/BVJyjVxI4-Y 

This is a great article for more info:

https://www.hercampus.com/school/quinnipiac/deceiving-facts-about-spray-butter