Are all calories equal?

jonnythan

In the same way, healthy food is better calories because they are in a better form for your body to digest and get the NUTRIENTS from. Unhealthy food is processed and has the calories, but very little of the nutrients, or it has nutrients in such a form that your body isn't able to process/absorb it. This is one of the reasons juicing is so popular. It's a very efficient way of getting a lot of nutrients in your body and in a form that your body will absorb.

It doesn't mean you can't eat unhealthy food, but all things in moderation. Those foods, when eaten too much, actually deprive your body of nutrients, even though they technically have the calories. It triggers your body to think it's starving because of the lack of nutrients and will in turn trigger the "fat storage" mode.

Um, no. Processed foods are often fortified, and we can use those nutrients. And they don't trigger starvation mode or fat storage mode. We (in general) just eat too much of them: too many calories.

So you are trying to say it's better to eat processed food that has lost almost all of its nutrients then had them added back in (usually chemically) rather than just eating the foods with the right nutrients and in the right form in the first place?

Oh...and no just because it was added back does not mean it is in a form our bodies can use. It usually means that maker of the food knows there is virtually NO nutritional value, so adds a little back in so that it looks better.

Avoid processed foods like the plague if you want to be healthy (notice I said "be healthy", not "lose weight".)

I'd like you to define "healthy" for us, so we can see how we measure up.

HeidiCooksSupper

Here's a dictionary definition of calorie from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/calorie: "Unit of energy or heat. Various precise definitions are used for different purposes (physical chemistry measurements, engineering steam tables, and thermochemistry), but in all cases the calorie is about 4.2 joules, the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 g of water by 1 °C (1.8 °F) at normal atmospheric pressure. The calorie used by dietitians and food scientists and found on food labels is actually the kilocalorie (also called Calorie and abbreviated kcal or Cal), or 1,000 calories. It is a measure of the amount of heat energy or metabolic energy contained in the chemical bonds (see bonding) of a food."

Calorie counts for food are calculated by burning the food and measuring the heat (energy) generated. The body reacts differently to different foods. For example, different proportions of glucose and fructose make it as far as the liver and therefore recent science indicates fructose is worse for you than glucose, lactose or other sugars in terms of liver health, adipose tissue deposits, etc. The calorie counts based on burning do not exactly match the calories metabolized when eating foods.

When we talk of calories in our food, we are speaking of "kilocalories" each of which is 1000 calories. The calorie loads in foods are based on laboratory calculations of heat generation not scientific measurement of the calories made available to the human metabolism. So, technically, any "calories" measurement we use for food is merely a reasonable approximation.

Be that as it may, the approximation works reasonably well for calculating the amount of foods we need to eat but different foods are better or worse for you. If you drink a slug of high fructose corn syrup, 100% of the fructose is likely to hit your liver and head toward adipose tissue. If you, on the other hand, eat an equivalent amount of calories as whole fruit, some of the fructose will be swept along with the fiber and out the back door rather than hitting your liver.

Arguably, at the gross level of kilocalories, a dietary calorie is a calorie. At the exact scientific level, there are differences in how various foods are metabolized. These differences are not reflected in laboratory-determined measurements of energy realized through burning foods to get calorie counts.

richardheath

In the same way, healthy food is better calories because they are in a better form for your body to digest and get the NUTRIENTS from. Unhealthy food is processed and has the calories, but very little of the nutrients, or it has nutrients in such a form that your body isn't able to process/absorb it. This is one of the reasons juicing is so popular. It's a very efficient way of getting a lot of nutrients in your body and in a form that your body will absorb.

It doesn't mean you can't eat unhealthy food, but all things in moderation. Those foods, when eaten too much, actually deprive your body of nutrients, even though they technically have the calories. It triggers your body to think it's starving because of the lack of nutrients and will in turn trigger the "fat storage" mode.

Um, no. Processed foods are often fortified, and we can use those nutrients. And they don't trigger starvation mode or fat storage mode. We (in general) just eat too much of them: too many calories.

So you are trying to say it's better to eat processed food that has lost almost all of its nutrients then had them added back in (usually chemically) rather than just eating the foods with the right nutrients and in the right form in the first place?

Oh...and no just because it was added back does not mean it is in a form our bodies can use. It usually means that maker of the food knows there is virtually NO nutritional value, so adds a little back in so that it looks better.

Avoid processed foods like the plague if you want to be healthy (notice I said "be healthy", not "lose weight".)

I did not say processed food was better. I said that processed food does contain nutrients we can use. If your claim is that vitamins added to e.g. flour are not bioavailable, I'd very much like to see the scientific research you are using to support that position. Yes, there can be changes in bioavailability depending on formulation, but that's not the same as saying they are unavailable, or that the food triggers "storage mode". Got any evidence for that, or are you retracting that statement?

I agree whole foods are probably better for the body, but that doesn't mean that eating processed food is necessarily harmful per se. It doesn't need to be demonized - just eaten in moderation. One can eat too much of either natural or processed foods and put on weight just the same. Is a person who got fat eating too much health food healthier than someone who got fat on processed food?

aidanbertie

Heyy,

You are not completely right, because all food having different calories, if we eat fast food then we get few calories or not. So we have to eat healthy and fresh food on daily.

j6o4

If it fits your macros and keeps you sane, mostly nutrient dense foods to keep you full and a little treat here and there as long as it fits your macro.

AnvilHead

I asked already. Do you have science to show?

Saying "I lost weight, therefore what I'm saying is correct" is a logical fallacy, and antiscience.

Can find a lot of studies saying different things about thermic effects. Here's an easy one on processed food:
http://www.foodandnutritionresearch.net/index.php/fnr/article/viewArticle/5144/5755

Here's a good article with a thorough explanation of TEF: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/metabolic-rate-overview.html

Excerpted from the article:

As it turns out, different nutrients have different individual TEF’s. Protein turns out to have the highest, to the tune of 20-30%. Meaning that of the total protein calories you eat, 20-30% is lost in processing. Carbohydrate stored as glycogen requires about 5-6% of the total calories. Carbohydrate converted to fat (which generally doesn’t happen in very significant amounts) uses up ~23% of the total calories as TEF. Most fats have a tiny TEF, maybe 2-3% (because they can be stored as fat in fat cells with minimal processing).

Since it’s usually impractical to sit and figure out the individual TEFs for each nutrient, the normal estimate used is 10% of total caloric intake. So if you consume 3000 calories per day of a relatively ‘normal’ mixed diet, you can assume that your TEF is about 300 calories per day or so. You also generally find that, with the exception of extreme diets (such as all protein), shuffling macronutrients has a pretty minimal overall impact on metabolic rate via TEF.

Notice that no differentiation whatsoever is made between "processed" and "unprocessed" or "clean" macronutrients. Also notice that the overall impact of TEF is fairly negligible.

Here's another article which discusses a peer-reviewed scientific study regarding the body's hormonal response to a fast food meal:
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/research-review/hormonal-responses-to-a-fast-food-meal-compared-with-nutritionally-comparable-meals-of-different-composition-research-review.html

Excerpted from the conclusion of the analysis:

This study basically backs up what I’ve been saying for years: a single fast food meal, within the context of a calorie controlled diet, is not death on a plate. It won’t destroy your diet and it won’t make you immediately turn into a big fat pile of blubber. And, frankly, this can be predicted on basic physiology (in terms of nutrient digestion) alone. It’s just nice to see it verified in a controlled setting.

It’s not uncommon for the physique obsessed to literally become social pariahs, afraid to eat out because eating out is somehow defined as ‘unclean’ (never mind that a grilled chicken breast eaten out is fundamentally no different than a grilled chicken breast cooked at home) and fast food is, of course, the death of any diet. This is in addition to the fact that apparently eating fast food makes you morally inferior as well. Well, that’s what bodybuilders and other orthorexics will tell you anyhow.

Except that it’s clearly not. Given caloric control, the body’s response to a given set of nutrients, with the exception of blood lipids would appear to be more determined by the total caloric and macro content of that meal more than the source of the food.

In terms of the hormonal response, clean vs. unclean just doesn’t matter, it’s all about calories and macros.