I have been paying more and more attention to food ingredients and nutrition facts recently. I am not exactly sure why, but it has piqued my interest. A week or so ago I made Leberkäsebrötchen for me and my wife, and I decided to put out both sweet mustard and extra spicy mustard. Usually people eat this with sweet mustard, but I decided to be crazy and use both. I warned my wife that the extra spicy was really very spicy. She mentioned that she thinks they put horseradish in it to make it extra spicy. I looked at the ingredients, and did not see any mention of horseradish. I hypothesized that it is simply a higher concentration of mustard seed. I then started looking at the nutrition facts, and I was surprised to see that the spicy mustard and the sweet mustard have about the same number of calories (167 vs. 170), in spite of the fact that the sweet mustard has 27 grams of sugar per 100 grams, while the spicy mustard has only 1.6 grams of sugar. Where were the calories coming from? As I looked further, I figured it out – fat! This was at first a surprise, but then as I thought about it more, it started to make sense. Many seeds have a lot of oil in them. You can even buy oil like sesame seed oil or grapeseed oil. I had always thought that mustard had virtually no calories, but I was now proven wrong. I next picked up a bottle of barbecue sauce, which has even more sugar than the sweet mustard, but less calories – again, probably due to less fat. When considering which condiment is the lowest in calories, it is important to take the usual quantity into account. Most people will use two to three times as much barbecue sauce on a sandwich as mustard, especially a very spicy mustard. So mustard probably still has fewer calories, when you look at it this way.
