A large, without butter, clocks in at a whopping 1,030 calories and 41 grams of fat.

“If it’s a sweet flavor, we’re adding added sugar, and that’s not necessarily where we want our sugar to come from,” she says.Īs for movie theater popcorn calories? The portion sizes (huge), “butter,” and heavy amounts of salt, make it highly caloric and can offset the fact that you’re eating a (healthy) whole grain.Īccording to MyFitnessPal, a small popcorn, without butter, has 225 calories with 11 grams of fat. And you may be adding 8 grams of added sugar to your snack. She points out that a serving of a sweet-flavored popcorn like kettle corn may have the same number of calories as the butter-and-salt variety, but the serving size goes from four cups to two. “The biggest mistake you can make is buying fun flavors,” Kasparek says. → No matter what you need to improve in your riding life, find it with Bicycling All Access!īut once you start straying from the unprocessed whole grain, sprinkled with some salt, you start to miss out on many of the health perks. A 2012 study from the University of Scranton found that popcorn contains up to 300 mg of polyphenols per serving, compared with 114 mg per serving of sweet corn and 160 mg per serving for all fruits. Popcorn, it turns out, has a high level of polyphenols, a powerful antioxidant that has been shown to help protect against cancer. The worst kind of oil is partially hydrogenated oil, which is a type of trans fat. The ingredients list, Kasparek says, should be short: popcorn, oil, and salt.Īnd the type of oil matters, when it comes to the health benefits of your popcorn, she says, recommending coconut oil-which, if you’re making your own on the stovetop, has a higher smoke point. Let’s take a look at the nutrition for a serving of pre-popped sea salt popcorn and a serving of microwave sea salt popcorn.

(Or, dare we say, penny for your pop.) Popcorn is what Kasparek calls a “high-volume food,” meaning you can eat quite a bit for very few calories. If you look at a no-frills bag of pre-popped popcorn, you get a lot of bang for your buck.

Movie theater popcorn oil