How Many 4th Of July Calories Did New Jersey Residents Consume?

No one wanted to hear this before the big holiday weekend, and understandably so. You wanted to enjoy your food guilt-free this weekend. But now the weekend is over and it's time to face the truth, and it might not be as bad as you think.

When you look at all the traditional foods that are associated with the 4th of July, you find that they may actually contain fewer calories than you might fear. And that's good because we love good news.

So, we're going to make a few assumptions about what everyone ate and come up with some interesting, and certainly not scientific numbers just to give you an idea of the calorie damage New Jersey incurred this holiday weekend.

We checked with the Calorie Control Council on how many calories each popular 4th of July food treat contains, and then we'll calculate some approximate numbers.

A plain hot dog or plain burger with a bun will cost you about 280 calories, so we're going to estimate you had 2 each over the course of the long weekend. That's 1120 calories right there.

You also probably had a couple of ears of corn this weekend. If it was two ears you ate, then we can add 310 calories to the total.

Was the host of your party grilling up some seafood? That six ounces of grilled shrimp only cost you about 100 calories. Good job!

And of course, we were chomping on chips while the food was cooking. Let's assume about 6 oz. of chips, and that's 900 calories. And if you had a cup of potato salad along the way, you can add in about 350 calories.

Let's assume that's all you ate at the barbecues. The total amount you added to your diet this weekend is about 2800 calories, and that's not really that bad.

We know that not everyone ate these foods this weekend in New Jersey, but just for fun, let's say they did. Then the total number of 4th of July meal calories we consumed this past weekend in the Garden State is about 26 billion.

Maybe we were better off not knowing.