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[Mechanism]

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[Dean Pomerleau]

Mechanism,

 

As far as I know CRON-O-Meter uses the standard portion sizes from the USDA database. Here is the USDA database entry for bananas. The serving size options CRON-O-Meter offers are the same ones as in the USDA database (e.g. 1 large banana = 136g), which are supposed to be the edible portion of the food item (i.e. sans banana peel). So if you want the serving sizes changed, you'll have to take it up with the feds. Good luck with that ☺.

 

--Dean

[Sthira]

I am wondering whether the grams estimate they use is for the pulp of the food only (e.g., for avocado does not include the seed, for lemon or banana does not include the peel).

In avocado's case, my version (iPhone) gives an option for "fruit, without skin and seed 136g"

 

For whole lemons, I have 13 options, and usually just choose a medium lemon. I grind up the whole lemon and put it into my drinking water. A medium lemon is only 58g, it says, and at such a low calorie rate I don't care much if it's not including the lemon's peel.

 

I don't eat bananas :-( which is itself bananas, I know.

[Michael R]

Mechanism,

 

As far as I know CRON-O-Meter uses the standard portion sizes from the USDA database. Here is the USDA database entry for bananas.  [...] which are supposed to be the edible portion of the food item (i.e. sans banana peel).

 

Dean largely nails it here: COM, like all (? the vast majority, I'm sure, and all the ones I've ever seen) nutrition analysis program, relies on a mixture of authoritative food databases like USDA and user-submitted entries; in neither case does COM have much insight beyond what you see (tho' the tool for submitting new foods into the "official" CRDB does have both an algorithmic laugh test (ie, you can't specify that a food serving has 90 g of carb and 10 Calories, "net carbs" be damned) and is looked over by a human (the latter feature being why new entries into the CRDB have slowed down to almost nothing).

 

Note that you can actually see from which food database COM is drawing for a given entry, so you don't have to guess (and can check USDA as applicable). And, as Sthira notes, one can also often find an entry specifically meeting one's requirements (as when I specify "oranges, raw, with peel" rather than "oranges, raw, all commercial varieties").

 

I don't eat bananas :-( which is itself bananas, I know.

 

Not at all: bananas are pretty darned empty Calories, with no particular evidence that they do one some specific good in a way distinct from fruits in general or meriting the opportunity cost in Calories generally or fruit servings in particular: they're really not worth eating unless you really like them a lot.

 

Plus, right now there's a serious danger that commercial bananas could be wiped out by a resurgent fungus, so slowing down global consumption could buy some time for agronomists work on new hybrids, GM solutions, new agronomical practices, new fungicides, etc in time to avert a bananapocalypse.

[Mechanism]

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