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Olive oil calories, and the free pour

Olive oil is 884 calories per 100 g and 100% fat. There is nothing else in it — no protein, no carbohydrate, no water. A tablespoon is 119 calories, a teaspoon is 40, and a pan that got a casual glug from the bottle got somewhere between two and four tablespoons.

Per 100 g

USDA measures are level.

The most expensive habit in food logging

Nothing else in a normal kitchen is 8.84 calories per gram. Sugar is about 4. Peanut butter, which everybody treats as dangerous, is 5.98. Oil beats them both and is the one thing people habitually add without measuring, straight from the bottle, while doing something else.

A two-second pour is easily 30 g. That is 265 calories — more than the chicken breast you are cooking in it, and it will not appear anywhere in your log unless you put it there.

How much stays in the food

Some of it does not. Oil left in the pan, absorbed into paper, or poured off with the juices never reaches you, and USDA has no way to model your pan. This is the one place where weighing precisely is genuinely hard rather than just inconvenient.

The workable method: measure the oil going in, log all of it, and accept you are over-recording slightly. Over-recording fat by a few grams a day is a much smaller error than the alternative, which is recording none of it.

Extra virgin, light, and the marketing

All olive oil is 884 calories per 100 g. "Light" olive oil is light in flavor and color, not in energy — it is more refined, not less caloric. Extra virgin differs in how it was pressed, its polyphenol content and its smoke point. None of that moves the calorie figure, because the figure is just fat.

The one-spoon rule

If you change one thing about how you log, make it this: use a measuring spoon for cooking oil. One tablespoon in the pan, logged as 119 calories, and stop pouring from the bottle. It is the highest-yield accuracy improvement available in any kitchen, and it takes four seconds.

Source: USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy release 2018-04. Figures are per 100 g as published; serving weights are USDA’s own. Records used: Oil, olive, salad or cooking (FDC 171413).

Common questions

USDA puts a tablespoon at 13.5 g, which at 884 calories per 100 g is about 119 calories. A teaspoon is 4.5 g, about 40 calories.

No. All olive oil is 884 calories per 100 g and 100% fat. "Light" olive oil is light in flavor and color, not in energy.

Yes, and it is the single most commonly missed item in a food log. A two-second free pour is easily 30 g, or 265 calories.

Not all of it reaches you, and there is no reliable way to model that. Measure what goes in and log all of it — slightly over-recording is a far smaller error than recording none.

Compare it with

All twenty-four are on the food macros index.