If I share equally with 4 other people, do we each get 20% of the calories?

If all of the rings contained exactly 1500 Kilo Calories and they were put into a blender and bended to a paste and you ate exactly 1/5 of the paste then you could be confident that you ate close to 300 Kilo Calories.

Probably not. The nutritional info is produced under ideal lab situations and will not count for the tons of variances that can happen in real life. Maybe the cook shorted or overloaded the plate, maybe the size of the rings aren’t even, or the amount of batter, or the cooking time was too long and it absorbed too much oil. Solid food is pretty hard to consistently get exact counts from.

At first glance this appears to be a question of simple math, but I suspect there’s more to it. But, yes, 1/5th of 1500 is 300.

If the plate really contains 1500 calories and you really eat 1/5 of it, then you will really take in 300 calories. If the plate contains about 1500 calories and you eat about 1/5 of it, then you will take in about 300 calories. This just follows from how the problem is set up.

If, however, you order a plate that is said to contain 1500 calories, then what actually happens depends on what the plate actually contains. Moreover, the number of calories that you absorb is not necessarily the same as the number of calories you take in.

And if this is a trick question to see whether or not anyone would be caught up by the number 4 in your title and respond that you would get 25% of the calories, seems like we passed the test!

I theory, yes. But there are a number of variables that could be involved including, that, even if you all could get exactly the same portions, the oil from deep frying might have drained from the onion rings differently so just the variation in fat content from ring to ring would effect how many calories were in any one of the portions..

If the onion rings are all the same size, and the batter is consistent then you will be close, But I think there are too many variables to be confident of an exact split.

If you split the plate perfectly equally – measured by mass of the batter and mass of the onion, not by number of rings – then you should receive about 20% of the calories. Since the plate had 1500 Calories (if the plate had 1500 Calories), then you should receive about 300 Calories.

Like the above posters have mentioned, there are a number of variables.

It is actually quite possible, even likely, that the chef put more onion rings on the plate than 1500 Calories. If I were the chef, I would much rather add in a few extra rings than have a customer complain about not getting enough.

Did you split the rings according to mass or by size? Different rings will have different numbers of calories. On average, the larger rings will have more calories, so if you eat the 5 largest rings, then you would have eaten more calories than a person who ate the 5 smallest rings. Splitting according to mass will solve this problem, but is usually completely impractical since the rings would almost always need to be cut apart.

Assuming that there was in fact exactly 1500 Calories in the full plate, then on average one member of the group of five would eat exactly 1/5 of the Calories. But this is only on average. I would put the odds of you in particular eating exactly 300 Calories as so low that the chance is almost non-existent. You may have eaten more Calories or fewer Calories, but you did not eat 300 Calories.

No. You only got 292 calories net. You expended 8 calories by ordering the food, splitting it into 5 equal parts, and then serving it to your friends. They each got 300. ;-)

Yes for practical purposes. I’m guessing you are trying to keep track of the calories you consume each day. Counting calories is not a place to drive yourself crazy with precision if your ultimate goal is to stick with the process and not get frustrated enough to give up.

Thanks, I thought it seemed logical that only eating part of the order would result in only getting part of the calories, but I just wasn’t sure.

@YARNLADY Yes, certainly, only eating part of the order would result in only getting part of the calories; the trouble is trying to calculate it with any precision.