What's up with carrots?
 

I love steamed carrots and eat quite a bit every day. I read in my points book that cooked carrots are more points than raw. What's the deal with that?

Carrots have more sugar and calories than most vegetables, and also vegetables also veggies can lose quite a bit of volume as they cook (as water and air is released as steam), so it often takes 1 cup or more of raw vegetables to make 1/2 cup of cooked.

I think even for raw carrots, they're no longer free if you eat more than a specific quantity (That's what I seem to remember from when I was in WW - I think something like 1 cup was free, but anything over that was 1 point or 1.5 cups was 1 point).

I follow an exchange plan and it's the same way. Most vegetables are 1 vegetable serving for 1 cup of raw vegetables or 1/2 cup of cooked vegetables (and there are exceptions because some veggies cook down a lot less and some a lot more - fruits are the same).

For example when it comes to spinache and many other greens, a whole ginormous pot of raw greens cooks down to a very small amount in comparison after cooking.

For super low-calorie veggies, it doesn't usually matter that much, but for the higher sugar veggies like carrots and beets, it's easy to eat a lot more cooked veggies than raw.

Even volume wise, a cup of raw, crunchy carrots takes a while to eat, but a cup of soft, tender, sweet carrots go down pretty easy (at least I find it so). When I was living by myself I'd cook a 2 lbs roast with 3 lbs of carrots, and the carrots would be gone long before the roast (I think I could live on carrots cooked with beef and onions - I could even throw away the beef and onions).