by Jay Hiller, December 27, 2022
Bacon. Photo by KG Baek on Unsplash
A lot of people like bacon. I’m not one of them but yesterday I had a reason to look up nutritional facts about it. I realized that if you don’t know 3 simple facts about macronutrients, it would be easy to misinterpret bacon’s nutritional information. The three facts are: each gram of protein equals 4 calories; each gram of carbohydrate is equal to 4 calories; each gram of fat is equal to 9 calories.
Here’s the screenshot from my phone:
At first glance it would appear that protein and fat are well-balanced in bacon with 12 grams of each macronutrient in three slices. But that is very very misleading. Of the 161 calories in three slices of bacon, 108 of them are fat (9×12); 48 are protein (4×12), 2.4 are carbohydrate (0.6 x 4). I don’t know what the remaining 2.6 calories. And you can see that its very clearly not a 50/50 split between protein and fat for this food.
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