Real Nutrition for Calories
Natosha Rick
Mat126:Survey of Mathematical Methods
Prof: Carolyn Gorczynski
02/16/2013

Real Nutrition for Calories When you are looking at the nutrition facts most people just trust what they see. There are so many things that are not what they seem, like sugar has more than just the name sugar on the ingredients list and then there is wondering how they calculate the facts for fat, calories, carbohydrates, and even sugar. With this thinking let’s take a look at what was covered in the book Mathematics in our World this book talks about how to calculate how many grams of calories came from fat, and then we look at how many calories came from protein. So first we used a formula for the grams of calories from fat. How they calculate this and get the percentage is different from what you would get if you were to do this using the real way to find this. The real way to obtain this information is to look at how many calories there are, and how many grams of fat there are. You then take the grams of fat and multiply it by 9 which convert it to calories since there are 9 calories in one gram of fat. After this you take the number of calories from fat and divide it by the total number of calories which will give you a decimal number. After you have the decimal number you would then convert it to a percentage by moving the decimal over two spaces to the right. This will give you the percentage of calories from fat. There is a similar equation to find calories from protein. For that you would look at the total number of calories, and the total number of grams of protein. To convert the number of protein to make it number of calories there are 4 calories for one gram of protein. With this take the number of grams of protein and multiply it by 4 which gives you the total you then divide it by the total number of calories and it will give you a decimal you do the same as above to convert it into a percentage after you have this percentage compare that to the amount the box states and think about how much more fat you have been eating then you thought. Below I will show you three different examples of this equation being done. First let’s look at Yogurt; most people know this as fat free, or lite in fat. If we look at the Yoplait strawberry cheesecake flavor it has a total of 70 calories, 1.5 grams of fat and 5 grams of protein. To solve for fat we would multiply 1.5 times 9 to get the number of calories from fat which is 13.5. Then we would divide 13 by the total number of calories to get a proper percentage so 13.5 divided by 70 which you get .18. After this we convert this to a percentage which is 18%. So 18% of the calories are from fat. So now we would find the protein with the other equation so there are 5 grams of protein and multiply that by 4 to get the number of calories from the protein which is 20. Then let’s take the twenty and divide it by the number of calories which is 70 which gives you .28 which converts to 28%. So 28% of calories are from protein. Next let’s take a look at Hotdogs something simple most people eat. It has a total of 110 calories, 9 grams of fat and 4 grams of protein. To solve for fat we would multiply 9 times 9 to get the number of calories from fat which is 81. Then we would divide 81 by the total number of calories to get a proper percentage so 81 divided by 110 which you get