Why Most Food Labels are Wrong About Calories

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sherbear702
sherbear702 Posts: 649 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
Everything I've been taught is a LIE!

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/why-most-food-labels-are-wrong-about-calories

I'm not trying to promote clean eating by any means, but this is an interesting article.

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  • Angel_Grove_
    Angel_Grove_ Posts: 205 Member
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    Definitely interesting. And great news for people trying to lose weight! I don't think it stated specifically, but presumably the calorie counts listed are the counts if the food was consumed completely. So the calories listed on your super processed food should be about accurate, while the calories listed on the same mostly unprocessed food will be an overstatement. If you're trying to lose weight, you get the benefit of a few less calories when you make raw/unprocessed choices and lose weight faster. Plus, healthier. Win/win!

    Now, if you're bulking but still trying to eat healthy, I suppose it could be frustrating.
  • TimothyFish
    TimothyFish Posts: 4,925 Member
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    That sounds more like it is saying that the problem is that we aren't calculating our calorie burns correctly, since it takes fewer calories to eat some foods than others.
  • segacs
    segacs Posts: 4,599 Member
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    I think it's saying that if you assume that your recipe is simply a sum of the calories of the raw ingredients, then you might be underestimating, because the cooking process changes the food. Which makes sense, though there really isn't an ideal way to do this.

    I think the goal is consistency, not necessarily 100% accuracy.
  • Hornsby
    Hornsby Posts: 10,322 Member
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    the article wrote:
    If you eat your food raw, you will tend to lose weight. If you eat the same food cooked, you will tend to gain weight. Same calories, different outcome.

    Lost me in the 2nd paragraph.
  • dawn0293
    dawn0293 Posts: 115 Member
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    I went to the place the article originated from. I see no studies being referenced. Am I missing something?
  • Hornsby
    Hornsby Posts: 10,322 Member
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    dawn0293 wrote: »
    I went to the place the article originated from. I see no studies being referenced. Am I missing something?

    No. It's just an opinion piece. No science behind it.

  • SapiensPisces
    SapiensPisces Posts: 1,001 Member
    edited January 2015
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    Hornsby wrote: »
    dawn0293 wrote: »
    I went to the place the article originated from. I see no studies being referenced. Am I missing something?

    No. It's just an opinion piece. No science behind it.

    ^ That. It's junk pseudo-science at best. What they are TRYING to talk about is outlined in this article. There's a linked peer reviewed summary article at the bottom which is where the author gets most of his information.

    http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/the-energy-balance-equation.html/

    Edit: Here is the link to full peer-reviewed summary article: http://nutritionreviews.oxfordjournals.org/content/67/5/249
  • CupcakeCrusoe
    CupcakeCrusoe Posts: 1,361 Member
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    Processed in the sense they mean does not equal whatever the heck "unclean" means. If you say to yourself, I will eat spinach, and eat raw spinach, you can't eat as much as if you eat cooked spinach, because the volumes are different.

    Is cooking spinach "processing" it? Uh, no.

    At least not from where I'm standing.

    Calorie counting does not change based on how you cook food. Not, as has been said, in any meaningful way. Thermodynamics applies every time. It doesn't just apply to "clean" food. Whatever that means.
  • I_Will_End_You
    I_Will_End_You Posts: 4,397 Member
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    I saw this today. I LOL'ed.
  • Metazoick
    Metazoick Posts: 96 Member
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    I'm not sure that I really buy the whole 'raw food results in way fewer calories' thing, but the studies given in that article are actually interesting (if you're into that kind of thing). One of them found that the rats who ate puffed food rather than the standard pellets had 30% more bodyfat than the controls while on the same diet/exercise regimen. While it'd be silly for me to generalise an animal finding onto humans like that, it's still an interesting finding, and it'd be nice to see it as a first step in rerunning the study with humans.

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