Hey friends-
Last night AND today I have been wondering about this, so figured I'd ask some experts...

I'm eating raw in-shell peanuts, and the package says that 30g are 150 cals (or something like that) - is that weight including the shell or just the nuts themselves? Was wondering the same last night about pistachios.

Part of the great thing about eating in-shell nuts as a snack is the time it takes to unshell them - I don't want to unshell them first and weigh them all.

Thoughts?

How about finding out how many calories there are in a single peanut (look online, I think Livestrong has quite a good database), and then just counting out your portion? I do that with grapes these days, they're high enough in calories that I don't want to share a punnet or even half a punnet at a time with my partner, and it's easiest to count them out as I am taking them off the stem to wash.

I hate it when packaging gives ambiguous nutritional info. I was eating a couple of taco shells last night, and the box provides the taco shells, a spice mix, and a packet of salsa. So the nutritional info was either 100g of pure taco shell, in which case I'd have to weigh the taco shells alone and divide by the number in the packet, or else it gave you the info for a taco shell with a portion of spices and salsa. Then you get cereal boxes which give you the info for a certain sized portion with a certain amount of a certain type of milk in there, which no doubt is wonderful if that's exactly the way you eat that cereal, but hopeless if you eat a different quantity or don't use cow's milk.

And then, of course, you get products with NO nutritional info on the packet and you have to spend ages trying to find the data for an unusual type of rice...

I've looked at a couple different sources and I think the value is for the nuts themselves.

SO...I weighed them in-shell, ate them, then weighed the leftover shells and pieces to find out how much the nuts themselves were.

Thank you math story problems from grade school!

I did something similar when I was making up a batch of chocolate spread recently. I weighed the ingredients before starting, poured water into the chocolate spread jar to determine its capacity, mixed up the ingredients a bit at a time until it tasted right, then weighed the remaining ingredients and subtracted the difference. And then I had to take the combined nutritional profile and apply it to a volume instead, as I can guess what proportion of a tablespoon I'm eating at a time but I am not going to mess around weighing the jar every time I have a bit of chocolate spread.

Oh well, quilting calculations can be worse.

Do you at least now know how many peanuts is a good portion for you?