Food calorie table: 90 foods per 100 g

How to read this table without getting it wrong

Unless stated otherwise, every value is per 100 grams of raw food, trimmed and with nothing added — no oil, no sauce, no sugar. These are rounded reference values from food composition databases: real variation between one piece and another, between brands or between cuts can be around 10%, and that is fine. Counting calories is not analytical chemistry; it is orienting yourself well enough to make better decisions. If you want the full framework, there is the guide on counting calories without going crazy and the one on how many calories you need per day.

Meat, fish, eggs and dairy

The group with the most confusion, because the difference between cuts and between preparations is enormous: a pork loin and pork belly come from the same animal and have nothing in common. Values are raw unless stated.

Grains, tubers and pulses

This is where the most expensive mistake lives. Look at the double row for rice and pasta: it is the SAME food, and the number changes almost threefold. If you write down 100 g of raw rice but you actually ate 100 g of cooked rice, you are logging 225 kcal too many. Do it the other way round and you fall short by the same amount.

Vegetables and fruit

The group where precision barely matters: apart from avocado and little else, you would have to eat enormous amounts for the figure to move your day. If you are starting out and counting feels overwhelming, start by not counting vegetables.

Fats, nuts and sweets

The group that decides your day. These are dense foods: a lot of calories fit into very little volume and very little time. There is no need to fear them — olive oil and nuts are among the best things you can eat — but they do deserve a measuring spoon nearby.

Processed food and drinks

For packaged food the table is only indicative: the label rules, because every brand formulates differently. Learn to read labels and always look at the per-100 g column AND the portion the manufacturer declares, which tends to be suspiciously small.

Mistake 1: confusing raw with cooked

This is by far the failure that throws counts off most. When cooked, rice, pasta and pulses absorb water: they weigh more and therefore have fewer calories per 100 g, even though the total energy has not changed. Conversely, meat and fish LOSE water when cooked: 150 g of raw breast comes off the pan weighing around 110 g, and those 110 g cooked have the same calories as the 150 g raw, not fewer. The practical rule is simple: decide whether you weigh everything raw or everything cooked, and be consistent. Weighing raw is more precise; weighing cooked is more convenient when you cook for several people.

Mistake 2: the oil that does not appear in the table

No calorie table includes the fat you cook with, and that is where most of the invisible calories of a normal day slip in. A tablespoon of olive oil is around 90 kcal; a generous stir-fry takes two or three. An 80 kcal salad of vegetables can end up at 350 without changing its appearance. This is not about cooking without oil — it is quality fat and it makes food taste good and satisfy — it is about counting it: use a spoon instead of a free pour and you will know exactly how much you have.

Mistake 3: stopping at the per-100 g number

The table gives you the value per 100 g because it is the standard unit of comparison, but you do not eat 100 g of anything: you eat a 120 g banana, a 180 g steak or a 30 g handful of almonds. The step almost everyone skips is multiplying. If weighing feels like a chore, there are visual shortcuts that work surprisingly well, and we develop them in the guide on counting calories without weighing your food.

Where the table falls short: mixed dishes

A table works very well with identifiable foods: a steak, an apple, a yogurt. It falls short exactly where we eat most of the time: a stew, a lasagne, a rice with things in it, the set menu at lunch. There is no row to look up, because the dish is a combination of ingredients in proportions you do not know, with an amount of oil you never saw. The realistic option is neither to give up estimating nor to take the dish apart ingredient by ingredient: it is to start from a reasonable estimate of the whole and correct it if needed.

How to estimate a real meal, step by step

1. 1

   Identify the 3 or 4 ingredients that matter

   In almost any dish, three ingredients explain more than 80% of the calories: the protein source, the main carbohydrate and the added fat. The vegetable side almost never changes the result.

2. 2

   Decide raw or cooked and be consistent

   If the rice is cooked, use the cooked row. If you weighed the meat before the pan, use the raw one. Mixing the two is what produces the 300-400 kcal errors.

3. 3

   Estimate the weight of YOUR portion

   With scales if they are to hand, and otherwise with the visual references in the table above. A fist of cooked rice, a palm of fish, a thumb of oil.

4. 4

   Add the oil and the sauces

   Count the tablespoons that went into the pan and divide between the people eating. For shop-bought sauces, go to the label: a tablespoon of mayonnaise is almost 100 kcal.

5. 5

   Round it and move on

   Your goal is a useful figure, not an exact one. If your estimate lands within 10% of the real value, it is already good enough to decide with. Chasing the last gram is the fast route to quitting.

A calorie table is an excellent pocket tool: it teaches you the order of magnitude of what you eat and removes the feeling of flying blind. But it is a map, not the territory. The territory is your plate today, with its oil, its portion and its mix of ingredients. Start by memorising four or five rows for the foods you repeat most, apply the three adjustments in this article, and for everything else let a photo do the boring work.