Calories In Cherries
How Many Calories In Cherries?
The number of calories in cherries depends a great deal on whether they are sweet or sour, fresh or frozen, canned or dried. The number also depends of course on how many you eat at one sitting. Needless to say, cherries are a low calorie food, as are most fruits.
The number of calories in cherries fresh from the tree is 74 per cup for sweet cherries, and 78 per cup for sour red cherries. If you are really determined to cut your intake of calories, sour red cherries might actually be better as you probably could not eat a cup of them, while eating 2 or 3 cups of sweet cherries is usually no problem. When you think about it, 2 or three cups of cherries contains has fewer calories than the typical candy bar.
Calorie Count Goes Up With Processing - Once you start processing cherries, or any other fresh fruit, things start to happen, not all of them good. The calorie count starts to rise, vitamins begin to disappear, and some substances are added that you might not want to know too much about. It's not that canned or frozen strawberries have no place in your kitchen. There are times they are needed for certain recipes or dishes, but fresh is definitely better.
A cup of sweet cherries, canned with a water pack will contain around 114 calories, about a 50% increase over fresh cherries. Cherries canned in a syrup pack weigh in at 169 calories per cup for a light syrup pack and 210 calories per cup for a heavy syrup pack, a two-fold and three-fold increase respectively, in calories. The one bad element (in terms of healthy nutrition, not taste) in cherries is sugar. Fresh cherries are 80% water, and 13% sugar, or 15 grams of sugar per cup. A cup of cherries canned in a light syrup pack or a heavy syrup pack has 40 and 50 grams respectively, of sugar per cup.
The king of the hill as far as the number of calories in cherries is concerned, is the package of frozen sweetened cherries. A cup of these gives you 52 grams of sugar, about the same as does a cup of cherries canned in a heavy syrup pack. The number of calories per cup however is 231, over 3 times the number of calories found in a cup of fresh sweet cherries. Compared to some other foods, this is still not a huge number of calories. From the standpoint of healthy nutrition however, the amount of sugar contained in processed strawberries could be of some concern. If you are really tracking every calorie, the number of calories in a single cherry is 4 according to most sources (a few sources insist upon a figure of 2 calories per cherry).
Calories In Other Fruits - The number of calories in cherries is slightly higher than for most other fruits, though not significantly higher in most cases. The calorie count for raspberries, nectarines, honeydew melons, and blackberries is roughly 60 per cup in each case, about 80% of that contained in a cup of cherries. Strawberries and watermelon are very low, at around 45 calories per cup, and nectarines are in about the same range. Besides being low in calories, cherries are a very nutritional food, rich in dietary fiber, vitamin C, calcium and iron. A cup of cherries will also contain meaningful amounts of magnesium, phosphorous, potassium, and smaller amounts of zinc and copper, all elements vital to our health and well being.
(Not Too Much) Cherry Pie Is Good - All of this doesn't mean you should go without a slice of cherry pie on occasion. Cherry pie is every bit as American as apple pie, and few people in their right mind would want suggest either of those items be banned from the diet as unhealthy. If you have either one with a big scoop of ice cream every day after dinner, you're probably putting on some pounds. Once a week though isn't going to kill you, especially if served with only a small scoop of ice cream. As the saying goes, "life is short, enjoy desert first".