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Restaurant Portions
Many burrito bars use whopping 12-inch tortillas. That triples the calories of our 6-incher, even using similar fillings (i.e., hold the queso).
- Moe's: 690 calories
- Chipotle: 740 calories
- Qdoba: 840 calories
If it's burrito night at home and you upgrade from a 6-inch-wide tortilla to an 8-inch-wide tortilla, that's a 2-inch difference; 2 is a third of 6 so the burrito will be one-third bigger, right? Ah, not so fast, grasshopper. Long-forgotten math insists that when diameter gets a little bigger, area gets a lot bigger. (You must take half the diameter, the radius, square it, and multiply by pi.) The area increases by much more than a third, and so do the calories if you fill that area with tasty filling. Below, we reveal the math for a chicken, black bean, salsa, and cheese burrito.
6-INCH TORTILLA
- Tortilla: 94 calories + 4 oz. filling: 138 calories = 232 calories
8-INCH TORTILLA
- Tortilla: 146 calories + 7 oz. filling: 241 calories = 387 calories
With 78% more surface area and fillings, the calories in a bigger burrito jump by 67%.
10-INCH TORILLA
- Tortilla: 218 calories + 11 oz. filling: 379 calories = 597 calories
Surface area, fillings, calories up by another 55%.
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