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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

What’s the point of providing nutritional data on raw bacon? Nobody eats raw bacon, do they?

Because you want to be able to log the calories/nutrients of the food you're eating before it's cooked into a dish.

You don't want to have to cook your bacon and then measure its mass before you know how many calories it has when you can just log the raw form before you cook it.

You don't want to do that, but unless you are consuming all the rendered fat that's what you do to get an accurate value.

Sure you do. And if you don't consume all of the grease, then you have some overestimation error in your tracking which is evened out by (but usually dominated by) all of your underestimation errors, like every time you forget to log the squirts of oil in the pan or that handful of mixed nuts or every time you eat out.

Having to cook your food first, take it out, measure it, and put it back in the dish you're making before you can estimate content doesn't seem like a recipe (pun) for habit forming here. Nor is it viable for anything but the most basic dishes like individually pan frying large ingredients.

Almost every protein that I consume is weighed raw for ease in logging. One reason is if you are cooking a dish with e.g. bacon as an ingredient, you may not be able or want to separate it out at the end. Likewise, if I sauté chicken breasts in a pan and then finish the dish with other ingredients, I probably want to just eat the food and not deal with weighing them after water loss. Providing both just provides greater ease in logging your meals and is exact-enough for most people :)

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