Using a Food Scale for Carb Counting

Learn how to use a food scale to weigh foods like chips and crackers to more accurately count your carbs.

Transcript

Using a Food Scale

A food scale is a helpful tool to ensure accurate carb counting. For snack type foods, it is especially helpful.

In our first example, we’ll take a look at baked chips. Remember, it’s important to look at serving size and total carbohydrates. Serving size is 1 ounce of chips, 28 grams or about 18 crisps. Total carbohydrate is 23 grams.

For snacks like chips, it’s a good idea to use a food scale. As you get down towards the bottom of the bag, chips are broken, and it’s hard to count out perfect chips. When looking at the label, the serving size says 1 ounce or 28 grams. This is the weight, do not confuse this with total carbohydrates. Using the food scale, we’ve already put the bowl on the scale and zeroed it out, we’re now going to pour chips in until it hits 1 ounce.

It’s OK to take a few chips off. We want to be accurate and get to exactly 1 ounce of chips. And this is what 1 ounce of chips looks like.

This is a food label for whole grain Goldfish. Remember to look at serving size and total carbohydrates. For whole grain Goldfish, it’s a great idea to use the food scale. You’ll see serving size is 55 pieces. No one wants to count out 55 pieces of Goldfish crackers. Serving size is 30 grams or 1.1 ounce. In this example, we’ll use the scale in grams.

We’ve already put the bowl on the scale, we’ve zeroed it out, we’ll pour in Goldfish until it hits 30 grams. You’ll see on the food label total carbohydrate is 20 grams.

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