My wife is starting weight watchers. According to her, the system assigns more points to cooked vegetables than it does to raw vegetables of the same kind and amount. What gives? From what I understand, the points are based on fat, calories, and fiber, none of which should be noticeably affected by cooking, I think.
I’m not particularly familiar with the Weight Watcher’s system, but the functional caloric content of some fruits and vegetables can actually be increased by cooking. When plants are raw, their cells are surrounded by a cellulose cell wall that your digestive system can’t break down efficiently, meaning that some of their nutrients and calories are locked up where your body can’t get at them. In cooking, those walls can be broken down, freeing up more calories (and breaking down some vitamins.)
There are a few vegetables, like spinach, which cook way down, so 1 cup cooked is a lot more food than 1 cup raw. ('Though those are both 0 Points.)
But mostly, the Points are a little wonky for a few entries. Why? Heck if I know. Generally wonky Points are due to rounding - occasionally you’ll find that 2 servings of a 0 Point food come out to 1.5 Points or something weird. Carrots are a head-scratcher, as well. You’ll find “Carrots, cooked - 1 cup - 1 Point” and “Carrots, sliced, cooked - 1 cup - 0 Point” and Carrots, raw - 1 cup - 0 Points". But that’s the only common vegetable I could find a discrepancy on. What’s she looking for, exactly?
I try not to sweat the small stuff. Overall, the FlexPlan has been great for me.
Yeah, carrots was the one that caught my eye. I made the mistake of questioning the accuracy of a single-number system. I get the idea, though.
Carrots and onions yeah - and it’s what WhyNot said about volume - they cook down enough so that you can fit more carrots and onions in a cup than raw ones. So it’s just enough to push it into Pointed territory.
One huge issue is how you cook them. Obviously if you are using oil, the fat content will be different. OTOH if you boil them, not so. Onion? Hmm, if you roast them on the grill, maybe?
Well, if you use oil, you’re supposed to add it to your Points for the day, either as a separate entry or by building a recipe (2 large onions, halved, 1 teaspoon olive oil,) and telling it how many servings that made and how many you ate. The software’s all there on the site. So if you play by the rules, your “1 onion, large” Points should stay the same, but you’d *also *use Points on the fat.
I even record cooking spray when I’m being very, very good on the Plan, and it does help make things more accurate and speed weight loss.
I thought that in the weight watchers program veggies were all essentially 0 points to encourage eating and filling up on them. Did this change recently?
Veggies are not zero points. WW uses a formula for calculating points, but the quick rule of thumb is to divide calories by 50. You’ll get a point count that’s close enough for quick figuring.
Veggies contain calories. Not many, granted, but if you load up on veggies, you’ll accumulate points. One of the things to check if you are not losing is to look at your log and see how many “zero” point items you are eating. If you are logging a bunch of them, you’re probably actually eating some extra points that you don’t know about.
Most veggies ARE zero points, Clothahump but yes you’re right they still contain calories.
Carrots and onions are one of the few vegetables (other than starchy ones) which have a point value that isn’t zero. And that is only when they are cooked.
And yes, it has nothing to do with how you cook them - anything you add to the cooking process (oil, etc) would have its own Point value.
That’s simply not true.
Most root vegatables and most grains increase their available calorific value massively when cooked. The ultimate example of this is the potato. You will starve to death eating raw potatoes, humans simply can not digest potato starch. However when you cook the potato the starch changes conformation and becomes completely digetsible. So a cooked potatoe has infinitely more available claories than a raw potato.
The same is true to a lesser degree of other vegetables. From memory carrots gain about 50% additional calories due to cooking, while even grains such as wheat and oats gain about 20%.
scout1222 said it doesn’t matter how they’re cooked. She didn’t say that it doesn’t matter if they’re cooked or not.
Also, potatoes aren’t a zero point vegetable, so for this particular discussion, it’s not particularly relevant.
The other thing that causes the points values to act in surprising ways is that the fiber to be used for the calculation is capped at 4 grams. So even if you continue increasing the calories and fat in the equation, after a certain point the fiber stays the same.
One gram of fiber subtracts 10 calories. Since many vegetables are high in fiber and low in calories, that’s why they end up being zero.
OTOH, corn isn’t zero because it has too much sugar. 80 calories per serving with only 2 grams of fiber.
From what I hear, that was because in a previous iteration of the points program, it wasn’t capped, and people were doing things like adding fiber powder to ice cream to make it zero points.
Susan
(5+ years at goal!)
And as I said, that simply isn’t true. Blanched or cold boiled vegatables of most types will have a far, far lower calorific value than vegetables that have been boiled for 15 minutes. The method of cooking has a massive impact on the available energy value of most vegatables.
Okay, I’m not interested in arguing calories, because I’m no expert.
When I said “it doesn’t matter how they are cooked” what I meant was “it doesn’t matter how you prepare them…the fact remains that they are zero points when raw, 1 point when cooked.”
Are you okay with that?
“Cold boiled” doesn’t make sense to me, but if you’re arguing that boiling a potato for 15 minutes allows more cellulose to break down than boiling it for one minute (blanching), then, duh. But you can’t argue that boiling a baked potato is different than baking it is different than frying it (taking into account the oil). I mean, if you baked a potato for two minutes, it would have a far lower calorific value. It would actually be zero, because I wouldn’t eat it, but that’s beside the point. 
And actually, when I said that initially, I was responding to WhyNot who thought it was related to whatever ingredients you add when cooking them. That assumption is not correct. The point value DOES change for the food itself. I’d guess it’s probably for the reason you’re talking about.