Rojak buah looks like a fruit salad, so people assume it's basically free calories. It's not, but it's also not a disaster. The dish is fresh mixed fruit and vegetables, usually jambu air, mango, pineapple, cucumber, and sengkuang, tossed in a thick sauce made from hae ko (sweet fermented prawn paste), tamarind, and a fair amount of sugar. The whole plate comes in at around 300 calories for 250g, but here's the thing: the 160g of fruit only accounts for about 75 of those calories. The 55g of sauce contributes 130 calories, and the 22g of crushed peanuts on top adds another 125. So more than 80% of the calories come from the sauce and nuts, not the fruit. Fair heads up that these numbers are estimates because solid nutritional data for rojak buah is genuinely hard to find, so treat the figures as a useful ballpark rather than gospel.
What actually moves the needle here is how heavy-handed the uncle is with the sauce ladle and the peanut scoop. Ask for light sauce and less peanuts and you can realistically drop the plate down to around 200 calories. On the flip side, the Chinese-style version that comes with a stick of youtiao fried dough dunked in jumps to about 430 calories. The fruit portion itself barely changes things, so if you're watching numbers, your negotiation is entirely with the sauce and the peanuts. Order without youtiao, tell them to go light on the hae ko, and you've turned a 300-calorie snack into a 200-calorie one without feeling shortchanged.