Don’t pass the mayo…high calories from condiments we usually forget to count
Hey, calorie counters out there. Did you add it all up and think you did a pretty good job this week? But you still didn’t lose any weight. Must be your slow metabolism, right? Or maybe it’s your condiments.
Condiments are those little dabs of this and that we slather on food to make it taste better. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of different kinds of condiments, ranging from the more mundane (ketchup and mayo) to the exotic, such as raita (a South Asian treat made from yogurt, vegetables, herbs and spices), bagoong monamon (salted fish sauce), and ponzu (a Japanese dipping sauce).
Like all other foods, some are low fat and low calorie and others pack a diet-busting wallop of both. If you aren’t paying attention, you could be getting more calories and more fat from your condiment than you are from the food you put it on. Here are some examples from my own refrigerator:
Vince’s Seafood Tartar Sauce with capers and dill. This is the best tasting tarter sauce I have ever eaten. A few spoonfuls can make a bland (but healthy) baked fish taste terrific. It contains cucumbers, onions, celery, peppers, parsley, lemon juice, and dill weed. But its number one ingredient is soybean oil. The number five ingredient is eggs. It also contains high fructose corn syrup. What shocked me as I was entering this condiment into PEERtrainer’s Calorie Wiki was the calorie and fat content. Two tablespoons have 150 calories, all of them from fat. This is 25% of the recommended daily value of fat. Three grams of the 16 grams of fat are saturated, accounting for 14% of the recommended daily value of saturated fat. I put this on fresh baked petrale sole converting a 100 calorie, 1 gram fat dish into 250 calories and 17 grams of fat. Holy cow!
Best Foods Real Mayonnaise. Ok, so now you know, I don’t use reduced calorie mayonnaise…I can’t stand the taste. I grew up eating Best Foods Real Mayonnaise, and well, it is the only mayonnaise that tastes “real” to me. For years, I have made a simple mayonnaise-based sauce to pour over lightly steamed broccoli:
2 tablespoons of Best Foods Real Mayonnaise
¾ tablespoon of Grey Poupon Dijon style mustard
Curry power to taste
Another smooth move on my part. This adds 100 calories to the 10 or so in my serving of broccoli – that’s assuming I only eat half of the sauce and my husband eats the other half.
Yank Sing Chili Pepper Sauce. I love to dip Dim Sum in this sauce, as if Dim Sum wasn’t fattening enough. I did notice, but failed to respond to the fact that it appears to be pure oil with some chunks of ground up chilis, black beans, and radish. Indeed, this is confirmed by the ingredient list. Corn oil is the first and, therefore, predominant ingredient in this sauce. The interesting thing is there is no USDA nutrition label on this product. Perhaps it is exempt because it is made by a local restaurant chain. Or perhaps it is exempt because they think no on in their right mind could use enough to impact their overall diet. In my case, they are wrong. I can only imagine the fat and calories I take in when I add another couple of spoonfuls of this delicious sauce to my plate of Dim Sum.
Now, the point is not that you have to abandon the condiments you love (although I was tempted to chuck the tartar sauce). The point is you have to count them. Read the labels or go to PEERtrainer’s Calorie Wiki. If your favorite condiment is not yet in the Wiki, add it.
Calories count even when they come in small packages…darn, again.