Is a Calorie Really Just a Calorie?

Count calories. A lot. However, it is one calorie not one calorie. Calories from different foods are metabolized differently, with different results. Worse yet, counting calories often has little to do with the amount of calories we consume. Dieters, diabetics, etc. are monitoring their calories based on inaccurate and outdated information: the number of calories and grams of sugar available is simply wrong.

Counting calories is a real disaster.

In Scientific American, Rob Dunn focuses on three themes:

• Almost all packaged foods contain the number of calories listed on the label. Most counts are inaccurate because they are based on an average system that ignores the complexities of digestion.
• Recent research shows that the amount of calories we absorb from food depends on the type of diet we follow, how we prepare our food, the bacteria in our guts, and the amount of energy we use to digest different foods.
• The current calorie count does not take any of these factors into account. Digestion is so complicated that counting calories will never be accurate.

Counting calories seems easy. A calorie (kilocalorie for purists) is a measure of heat: it’s the amount of heat needed to raise one kilogram of water (2.2 pounds) one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). Fat provides about nine calories per gram, alcohol provides seven, and carbohydrates and protein provide only four. Every nutrition label, diet book and fitness tracker is based on these numbers, developed in 1896 by American chemist Wilbur Olin Atwater.

However, Atwater tried to estimate the average number of calories in a gram of fat, protein and carbohydrates, not in actual foods. The problem: no two foods are the same, they are all digested differently. Think corn oil and corn. When you sprinkle corn oil on a salad, 100% of the oil is available to your body as soon as it hits your small intestine and requires little work to digest.

Now think of an ear of corn. Each grain contains oil and many carbohydrates, but both require processing. Your teeth chew and crush the seeds, your stomach grinds and breaks down the pulp with strong acids, enzymes, etc., and then your intestines take over. It will take several hours for the final nutrients to be extracted, and even then many grains remain intact after removal.

It is possible to estimate the calories in corn oil in a salad, but it is impossible to estimate the calories available to different people from the same ear of corn.

Counting calories: a mystery within a mystery, shrouded in mystery. And it’s even worse. Young plants have relatively thin cell walls, making them easy to break down during digestion. However, older plants have more stable cell walls and are more difficult to digest. The result: We get fewer net calories from older plants than from young ones.

There is no way to estimate the age of the different fruits, vegetables and grains we buy or how our bodies digest them. Therefore, there is no way to accurately estimate how many calories we consume or how many calories we use for digestion.

The number of calories is at best an estimate. And now things are getting complicated.

Your body is unique. It has a unique digestive process and a unique collection of gut bacteria. If you and I were fed identical servings of a food, we would gain a different net amount of calories. With pure sugar or pure oil, the differences would be minimal. We would both extract most of the available calories.

However, real food is very different from pure sugar and pure oil. If you and I ate identical meals with wild game and a salad of seeds and nuts, our bodies would react very differently. Venison is tough and chewy; The seeds have hard cellulose shells that pass intact through the intestines, allowing them to germinate and form a friendly manure pile. Venison, seeds and nuts must be chewed thoroughly, crushed in the acidic bath of the stomach for about an hour, then processed for several more hours in the small intestine, where natural enzymes and intestinal bacteria break down the pulp into digestible components. Our bodies are different; Our digestive processes will be different.

So…a calorie is not a calorie. What matters is the source. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t stop Big Food from lying about it. Here’s a quote from a book my wife and I use often: The Fat Chance Cookbookby Dr. Robert Lustig and my chef friend Cindy Gershen:

“The Coca-Cola Company’s 2013 video “Coming Together” states: “We must all fight obesity based on one simple, common-sense fact: All calories count, no matter where they come from, including Coca-Cola and anything with calories…” In other words, “A calorie is a calorie.” »

“That’s simply not true.”

Lustig and Gershen cut to the chase: Coca Cola (and all sugary drinks) provide a classic definition of empty calories. Sodas and sports drinks contain sugar, various artificial additives and sometimes a sprinkling of micronutrients to impress health fanatics with double-digit IQs. They have no nutritional value. So if someone drinks 1,500 calories of cola every day (which is easy to do), they still need over 2,000 extra calories from real foods with real nutrients, and all those empty calories of cola are making them fat and diabetic.​