I didnt know black pepper contained calories. For some reason, I thought it was calorie free. A table spoon has 15 calories--which I know is not that much, but I put ALOT of it on almost everything.

Well, depending on how much you use, I doubt your sprinkles here and there would add up to a whole tablespoon. That's a LOT of pepper.

But wow, I didn't know that. About the calories.

I suppose that all spices have calories, it's just that we generally use such a small amount of them that the calories they add to our diet are infinitesimal.

For example, I never bother to count the few leaves of basil I put on my sandwich or the teaspoons of basil I throw in my spaghetti sauce. But if I make pesto, which uses 2.5 cups of basil, I count the calories in it when I figure out the total calories for the pesto.

I used to count the calories in fresh herbs, enough that I am now very comfortable that unless I'm using cups of the stuff, there aren't enough calories in the herbs to worry about. For example, if I make a recipe that calls for 1/4 cup of fresh parsley, that is 5 calories, but if the recipe makes 4 servings, it is only 1.25 calories per serving. Not worth worrying about.

I'm sure this goes for your black pepper. Let's say you sprinkle 1/8 a tsp of black pepper on something (which would be a lot of pepper to sprinkle on a single serving of anything). That's .625 calories. Even if, with all your sprinkling, you manange to eat an entire tsp of pepper in one day, that's still only 5 calories. Given that all this calorie counting is just an estimate anyway, you're probably 5 calories over on something else. So I wouldn't worry about it.

- Barbara