How many calories are in flour?

Gold Medal All-Purpose Flour has 100 calories per ¼ c.

: ) You read the bag!

Where do the calories come from? The starch?

Right. From carbohydrates.

Nutrition Facts

Total Carbohydrates
95.4g

Source

Flour is like sugar.

No it’s not!

Let me rephrase: white flour is almost like sugar. Take a look at this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysaccharide#Starches

“Starches are glucose polymers. They are made up of a mixture of Amylose and Amylopectin. Amylose consists of a linear chain of several hundred glucose molecules and Amylopectin is a branched molecule made of several thousand glucose units. They can be digested by hydrolysis, catalyzed by enzymes called amylases. Humans and other animals have amylases, so they can digest starches.”

“Flour contains a high proportion of starches, which are a subset of complex carbohydrates also known as polysaccharides. The kinds of flour used in cooking include all-purpose flour, self-raising flour, and cake flour including bleached flour. The higher the protein content the harder and stronger the flour and will produce crusty or chewy breads. The lower the protein the softer the flour for better cakes, cookies, and pie crusts.”

“Whole-wheat flour is more nutritious than refined white flour, although in a process called food fortification, some micronutrients are added back to the white flour (required by law in some jurisdictions). Fortified white wheat flour does not, however, contain the macronutrients of the wheat’s bran and germ (especially fiber and protein). Whole wheat is a good source of calcium, iron, fiber, and other minerals like selenium.”

So in terms of calories white flour is almost like sugar.

Yes, I agree that they have close to the same calorie content, but sugar is useless!

Why is sugar useless? Flour is mostly sugar and our body needs exactly that. Same for sugar as such. It doesn’t make sense to think of sugar as something useless. We need to brush our teeth, sure. We need to watch the total number of calories per day, yes. Turning sugar into a demon isn’t necessary. Same for fat.

As with anything else, Amercians overkill with the sugar. We need salt too. There is plenty of salt in our processed food, most of it anyway. We don’t need to add a ton of it after it’s cooked but most people do. We don’t need to add sugar to our pre-sweetened cereal, but many people do. We get plenty of what we need in our foods.
Too many of our people are overweight. If demonizing fat and sugar will help them lose weight, help them avoid excess, I say go for it. They’ll still get plenty of both in a normal American diet without piling extra on.

You are right. My only point was that we shouldn’t think that white flour is much better than sugar. I completely agree that we don’t need to add sugar when something already tastes pretty good. Yet demonizing fat and sugar can actually be counterproductive. There’s nothing wrong with 3.5% or 1.5% fat in yogurt for example. There’s nothing wrong with olive oil on a fiber-rich salad and so forth.