Edible portion
The edible portion is the part of a food that is actually eaten after removing peel, bones, seeds and shells; composition tables state whether a value refers to the edible portion or to the food as purchased.
A banana on a scale is not a banana in your mouth. Roughly a third of its weight is peel. Composition tables handle this by declaring whether a value describes the edible portion or the whole item as bought, and by publishing a refuse percentage to convert between them.
Where it bites hardest
Fruit with peel or stones — mango, banana, orange, custard apple. Bone-in meat and whole fish, where the refuse fraction can exceed 30 per cent. Prawns and eggs in shell. Vegetables with substantial trimming, such as cauliflower or pumpkin.
Logging a 250 g mango against an edible-portion value overstates it by about half. Logging 300 g of bone-in chicken as if it were all meat does the same.
The habit that fixes it
Weigh what goes on the plate, not what comes home from the market. If that is impractical — you cannot easily weigh cooked chicken off the bone — use the whole weight and pick a database entry that explicitly says "with bone", which most good tables provide.
Why apps get this wrong so often
User-submitted entries rarely state which basis they used, so two entries for "chicken curry" can differ by a third for this reason alone, before anyone has argued about the oil.
Sources
- 1.FAO/INFOODS food composition databases — Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
- 2.Indian Food Composition Tables 2017 — ICMR–National Institute of Nutrition
Related reading
- How to calculate the calories in a recipe you cooked
A worked example from a real pot of dal: count the raw ingredients, add the fat, divide by real servings, save the number. Fifteen minutes once per recipe.
- Nine calorie tracking mistakes that quietly add up
The errors that make a careful food log disagree with the scale: cooking oil, serving sizes, weekend gaps and raw-versus-cooked entries, with the fix for each.
- How to count calories in home-cooked food
Home cooking has no barcode and no single right answer. The pot method, the oil problem, household servings, and reusable numbers for the food you eat.
- IFCT or USDA: which numbers should you trust?
Two national food composition tables, built for two food supplies. When each one is right, why they disagree about the same food, and what to do about it.