How accurate is your calorie counting.

BhangraPrince
BhangraPrince Posts: 123 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Take a look at this 5 minute video
https://youtu.be/hE2lna5Wxuo

Replies

  • Cynsonya
    Cynsonya Posts: 668 Member
    Eye opening!
  • BhangraPrince
    BhangraPrince Posts: 123 Member
    650 calories for a supposed healthy muffin
  • rankinsect
    rankinsect Posts: 2,238 Member
    I'd be interested to know what methods they used to calculate their experimental caloric values. Clearly they started with bomb calorimetry, but they don't say whether they analyzed the composition and did any corrections. For example, fiber and protein will give significantly higher numbers from calorimetry, because the human body cannot digest fibers such as cellulose, and cannot oxidize protein further than urea, but a bomb calorimeter will oxidize both fully.

    The FDA allows multiple methods to calculate calories for labels, and many are more accurate (for our purposes) because they don't simply look at the physical energy content, but how much of that energy our bodies are capable of metabolically extracting. Without knowing if this lab was attempting to measure the total energy content or the biologically available energy content it's hard to interpret their findings.
  • Camo_xxx
    Camo_xxx Posts: 1,082 Member
    Obviously the weights of restaurant portions is going to vary from the sample they tests at the lab to establish the calorie count. not even sure why that guy wasted his time doing that research.
  • datsundriver87
    datsundriver87 Posts: 186 Member
    It would be impossible to do but the real study would be to see consistency of fast food places and their calories. There's always going to be a small margin of error +- the stated calorie, but if restaurants are consistently way over the calorie count that is stated it becomes an issue.
  • mpat81
    mpat81 Posts: 353 Member
    Good information. The muffin is surprising.

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