Is There Calories in Popcorn?

There's very few calories in popcorn so you can eat more without weight gain, unless you drown it in butter! As snacks go, you can’t do much better then unsweetened, unbuttered popcorn. When compared to potatoe chips and candy bars, popcorn wins hands down.

The calories in popcorn vary greatly depending on what you put on it. Plain popcorn with nothing on it (air popped or microwave) has approx 31 calories per cup and 0 fat. Add some caramel coating and you're up to 157 calories a cup with 5 grams of fat. Oil popped plain corn has 55 calories with 3 g fat. Cheese or butter flavored is about 55 calories with 5 or grams of fat.

Of course, popcorn has other nutritional qualities. It has lots of fiber as well as calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and lutein. It has no fat (unless you add butter) and has no preservatives or additives.

When comparing the calories in popcorn to other snacks, you can plainly see that popcorn is a much better choice if you are watching your waistline. A 2 cup serving of popcorn yields about 62 calories and 0 fat while a candy bar is about 250 with 14g fat and a bag of chips roughly 150 and 9 grams of fat. You could eat about 8 cups of popcorn instead of that bag of chips!