Draining and rinsing canned veggies and fruits?
 

I have a cupboard loaded with canned fruits and veggies. I have just started calorie counting and the calories in these canned food astounds me! My mother told me she heard/read somewhere that by draining and rinsing them off you can get rid of some of that excess sodium, sugar, etc. Anyone else heard of that?

I know for future purchases to pay better attention to calorie content and light syrup/low sodium type of labels, but what about with the ones I already have?

You can rinse away some of the sodium from veggies. I've read claims of anywhere from 40% to 65% can be rinsed away. I've never heard anything about sugar and fruit, though. I'm assuming the fruit absorbs a lot of sugar in the can.

If the fruit is packed in syrup and you rinse all that off, you'd be rinsing off some of the sugar. Even if it's packed in fruit juice, I think the nutritional info includes the juice unless it says it is for a drained serving, so discarding the juice would eliminate some of the sugar and calories. The problem is that, whether it's packed in syrup or juice, it's hard to know how much sugar you rinsed off, versus how much of the sugar listed in the label is in the fruit itself or was absorbed by the fruit from the packing liquid. So there's no way to really tell the amount of sugar or calories you eliminated.

I have this same problem with some canned trout that I bought. It's packed in oil and brine and it looks like the calories listed include all the oil and brine, which I drained off. But I don't know how much of it was oil and how much of it was brine (otherwise I could just measure the amount of oil I drained off). So I don't really know how many calories I ate.

In this situation, I just assume the full calories listed for a serving. I'm over-counting, but that's better than under-counting and there are surely going to be times when I make a mistake in the other direction. I figure in the end, it all evens out.