Seems magical. Using cooking oil to fry an omelet for example is loaded with calories.
But cooking spray works just as well and has zero calories. What’s the secret here?
Cooking spray doesn’t have zero calories, but the reason people think that’s true is essentially due to a loophole in nutrition labeling requirements. Essentially, the label says it’s 0 calories because of the declared serving size. For any foods, if the declared serving size contains less than 5 kcal (calories), the manufacturer is permitted to round down to 0. This is exactly the reason why Tic-Tacs - probably the most well-known example of this - indicate that they have 0 calories per serving, even though technically each Tic-Tac mint averages about 2 calories. Since the serving size is <5 calories, it can be rounded down to 0.
However, if you were to measure out 1 gram of cooking spray, it will still contain roughly 9kcal - the same as a gram of pretty much any liquid cooking oil.
It does not have zero calories.
If the caloric total of one “serving size” is less than 5, the manufacturer is not required to list any calories. It’s straight up oil, and thus has about 9 calories per gram.
A good rule of thumb is to count about 10 calories for every full second you’re spraying.
According to “FDA CFR - Code of Federal Regulations Title 21”, if the the cooking spray manufacturer defines one spray can be one or more spray portions and define one portion is 4.999999 calorie, then the cooking spray manufacturer may label one spray portion is ZERO calorie.
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So a label ZERO calorie could mean 0 to 4.999999 calorie. So it is a trick of mathematic. If a normal portion is 9 calorie, I can make my portion half of normal portion and zero calorie.
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Same way tic tacs have “0 sugar” - if it’s under a certain threshold, you can legally say it’s 0. So for a 1/10th of a second spray that would only give one calorie, they’re allowed to call it 0. So they do.