"Macro Friendly"
Natalie Antin
“Try my new low calorie and high protein ___” are the first words uttered in so many “healthy” TikTok recipes. I’ve noticed a trend that feels like it’s morphed into an obsession in the online health community to make recipes as low in calories and high in protein as possible. I’ve witnessed many recipe creators on TikTok driven to reduce calories as much as is physically possible, and frankly going to extreme lengths to maximize the macronutrients, or “macros” of their recipes. I consider myself to be someone who is willing to try a variety of foods and cooking techniques, but once you tell me to rinse my shredded, already fat-free cheese, you’ve lost me. It seems that in an effort to reduce calories in recipes, high fat ingredients are the first to be swapped out or removed altogether. In some cases this makes sense, if a recipe still works when swapping whole milk for heavy cream, for instance, absolutely do it. However, this swapping gets out of hand, and becomes pointless to me, when intricate recipes become flavorless because they are practically fat-free and lower in calories.
One example —the most egregious, in my opinion— of low fat ingredient swaps commonly used and promoted on TikTok is the
substitution of oils for cooking spray. So many recipes, particularly chicken recipes, advise spraying the meat in with an alternative to oil like PAM before searing or frying it. t Like an Italian nonna, I too, believe that there is never too much olive oil, so this particular trend of using cooking spray is difficult for me to get behind. The sheer caloric density of cooking oil is what causes recipe creators to substitute them for cooking sprays. If the goal is to reduce calories as much as possible, why use a 120 calorie tablespoon of olive oil when you could use 0 calorie cooking spray instead? Yes, most cooking sprays technically contain 0 calories, but that comes with a caveat. The typical serving size for said 0 calorie serving is about ¼ of a second of spray. To put this in perspective, a 5 ounce bottle of olive oil spray from Target contains 0 calories per serving, but a whopping 470 servings per container. That equates to roughly 100 servings per ounce or in other words, nothing. So while yes, cooking sprays may technically be 0 calories, in reality a typical portion contains far more than that label In fact, if you were to follow the instructions of one of these recipes and use only one serving of cooking spray, it’d be as if you were using none at all.
Cooking any food (that does not naturally contain fat) over a direct flame without the addition of fat leads to less than stellar results. This includes meats, vegetables, carbohydrates, and any other food that can be cooked over direct heat. Without fat, there is nothing to prevent the food from burning, and no way to caramelize the food or derive any real flavor from the cooking process. Using 1/100th of a gram of cooking spray is not nearly enough fat to enhance the flavor of a food through cooking. Just one tablespoon, or even a teaspoon of olive oil is enough in most cases.
Why does any of this matter and how is it connected to TikTok? Well, I’d argue that despite the good intentions behind healthy recipes, attempting to remove as much fat as possible from the recipe is harmful. I have tried many of these recipes before but often use them for inspiration rather than following them to a T. Assomeone who is experienced in the kitchen and has enough knowledge and background to know when I want to follow the recipe exactly and when to deviate, I can create a dish that may be slightly less healthy but better tasting. However, for someone who is new to cooking and looking for a healthy alternative to processed foods, they may find the recipes disappointing. These are not bad recipes, the creators have just taken the idea of calorie reduction too far, yielding disappointing results. To people who eat it all the time, fat free cheese may be indistinguishable from regular cheese, but to many others it tastes distinctly of old cardboard. This extends to cooking sprays as well. To those acquainted with the distinct flavors of reduced or nonfat foods there is minimal difference, but to the unacquainted, the difference is stark. Like all foods, diet foods are a matter of taste and what tastes normal to some may taste completely unappealing to others. It is, however, frustrating for someone who is not experienced with cooking to have a recipe yield mediocre results, and to understand that these results may be attributed to the ingredients used, not necessarily because of their own cooking skill.
What would TikTok think of this?
Dieting is hard and if eliminating almost all fat when cooking works for some people, then to each their own.. I still find many viral “healthy” recipes unsatisfying, and I imagine that others do too. . The online obsession to make every recipe macro friendly has been taken to its extreme. Recipe creators are doing everything they can to drive down the calorie number, not only to make the recipe as healthy as possible but to get clicks and views. A recipe with 500 calories and 50 grams of protein is going to perform better in the TikTok feed than one with 800 calories and 35 grams of protein. The truth is, very few people who are struggling to lose weight are doing so because of the tablespoon of olive oil they are cooking with or the handful of regular shredded cheese they’re using. America is in the midst of an obesity epidemic and the primary culprit is not the olive oil or cheese.