Is Ketchup Making You Fat?

If you're anything like my wife, you eat everything with ketchup. Okay, except for cereal, soup, and tuna sandwiches, everything else is fair game. And I don't just mean a drop to add some color. I mean "Are you having chicken with your ketchup?" territory.

While some might argue that ketchup is healthful, others maintain that the sugar and consequently the carbohydrates may cause weight gain abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Story. (Note: For the purposes of clarity, I will use sugar and carbohydrates interchangeably).

To be fair, my wife is the one who suggested the possibility that her ketchup obsession is hindering her weight-loss efforts. So I set out to see if that were true. A tablespoon of ketchup is 15 calories, 4 grams of sugar. I would say that my wife eats at least two tablespoons of sugar a day, if not more. If she has macaroni for lunch, for instance, that's at least a tablespoon right there. And if she has chicken for supper, there's ketchup for that as well as for the side dish, which is generally rice or potatoes. But let's call it two just for the sake of argument. That's 30 calories, 8 grams of sugar, times 365. Altogether we're talking 10,950 calories, 2920 grams of sugar a year.

If you consider that 3,500 calories add up to a pound, her ketchup alone is adding three pounds. And if you multiply that by years, it adds up to 30 pounds over ten years.

Truthfully, my wife has not gained weight since we married over eight years ago, and the above calculations are oversimplifying a matter that is way more complex. Yet I mention it because ketchup consumption often flies under the radar. In other words, when counting calories or recording what you ate in a food diary, ketchup is seldom mentioned. Sure, you'll write down the tablespoon of oil you added to your salad, the sandwich cookie you had to tide you over until supper, and even the French fries you stole from your son's plate. But the calories of ketchup count just as much as the calories in the other foods, and perhaps it's something to keep your eye on.

My condiment of choice is mustard, coming in a grand total of zero calories. Too bad my wife doesn't like it.