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).