Kcal?!?!?

CinnyAnn78

I have never heard of kcal, so please forgive me if this is a dumb question, but how would I convert 63kcal to calories burned? I just did an exercise but it only gave me kcal not calories so I don't know how to put it in on here.

aeloine

It's pretty much 1-to-1 I *think*.

kommodevaran

"Calories" is just short for "kilocalories", and so is "kcal".

CinnyAnn78

Oh wow! Thanks yall

Kalex1975

@Aaron_K123 has a really detailed post about calories here

From that post...

[T]he energy production of foods are quite large when measured in calories and are in the range of thousands of calories. As such food calories are actually kilocalories (1 food calorie is 1000 calories). So 4000 calories is 4 kilocalories which is 4 food calories

Well worth a read, I learned a lot!

Aaron_K123

Kalex1975 wrote: »

@Aaron_K123 has a really detailed post about calories here

From that post...

[T]he energy production of foods are quite large when measured in calories and are in the range of thousands of calories. As such food calories are actually kilocalories (1 food calorie is 1000 calories). So 4000 calories is 4 kilocalories which is 4 food calories

Well worth a read, I learned a lot!

Always nice to hear someone got something out of it....thanks.

And yes, 1 kcal is 1 Calorie. I can only assume people didn't like saying kilocalories (probably people who use imperial rather than metric) so they just capitalized Calorie and used that instead. Of course the vast majority of people who saw Calorie capitalized in the middle of a sentence would think it was a typo so pretty much everyone just says calories. Of course then 1 kilocalorie is 1 calorie which sound dumb but yeah. It would be like if people started calling kilometers Meters but then dropped the capitalization and just called them meters. It is kind of stupid.

1 calorie (as in 1/1000th of a Calorie) is a unit of energy defined as the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram or 1 mL of water from room temp by 1 degree celsius. When applied to food though a bite of a sandwich would contain something like 20,000 calories so for food they use kilocalories so it is a more reasonable number (ie 20 kcal in that example) but just call it Calories I guess because kilocalorie sounds scary or something idk.

PAV8888

Though if that quote was correct it should be "4 food Calories" with a Capital C in Cal by convention to indicate kcal

Aaron_K123

PAV8888 wrote: »

Though if that quote was correct it should be "4 food Calories" with a Capital C in Cal by convention to indicate kcal

Yeah but no one actually follows that convention so at some point if you can't beat em...just join em.

To be honest it's an idiotic convention anyways....I mean what do you do for example if you want to talk about a calorie (1/1000th of a kcal) but it is the first word in your sentence? Do you capitalize it?

PAV8888

<hauty sniff> well *I* TRY to follow the convention

No danger of confusion because the confusion is when you're labeling a number so it would always follow that number.

Presumably if you thought there might exist a misunderstanding and you wanted to talk about calories but had to capitalise them you could explain!

I started capitalising them the first time I was staring at my screen wide eyed wanting to convert kilojoules to kilocals and I had no idea how to do the conversion and what that meant in relationship to the Calories I used everyday!

kommodevaran

Aaron_K123 wrote: »

Kalex1975 wrote: »

@Aaron_K123 has a really detailed post about calories here

From that post...

[T]he energy production of foods are quite large when measured in calories and are in the range of thousands of calories. As such food calories are actually kilocalories (1 food calorie is 1000 calories). So 4000 calories is 4 kilocalories which is 4 food calories

Well worth a read, I learned a lot!

Always nice to hear someone got something out of it....thanks.

And yes, 1 kcal is 1 Calorie. I can only assume people didn't like saying kilocalories (probably people who use imperial rather than metric) so they just capitalized Calorie and used that instead. Of course the vast majority of people who saw Calorie capitalized in the middle of a sentence would think it was a typo so pretty much everyone just says calories. Of course then 1 kilocalorie is 1 calorie which sound dumb but yeah. It would be like if people started calling kilometers Meters but then dropped the capitalization and just called them meters. It is kind of stupid.

1 calorie (as in 1/1000th of a Calorie) is a unit of energy defined as the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram or 1 mL of water from room temp by 1 degree celsius. When applied to food though a bite of a sandwich would contain something like 20,000 calories so for food they use kilocalories so it is a more reasonable number (ie 20 kcal in that example) but just call it Calories I guess because kilocalorie sounds scary or something idk.

I don't understand the convention of capitalizing, but we make abbreviations for everything, because it's easier - "kilo" and "kg" are both short for "kilogram".

Aaron_K123

kommodevaran wrote: »

Aaron_K123 wrote: »

Kalex1975 wrote: »

@Aaron_K123 has a really detailed post about calories here

From that post...

[T]he energy production of foods are quite large when measured in calories and are in the range of thousands of calories. As such food calories are actually kilocalories (1 food calorie is 1000 calories). So 4000 calories is 4 kilocalories which is 4 food calories

Well worth a read, I learned a lot!

Always nice to hear someone got something out of it....thanks.

And yes, 1 kcal is 1 Calorie. I can only assume people didn't like saying kilocalories (probably people who use imperial rather than metric) so they just capitalized Calorie and used that instead. Of course the vast majority of people who saw Calorie capitalized in the middle of a sentence would think it was a typo so pretty much everyone just says calories. Of course then 1 kilocalorie is 1 calorie which sound dumb but yeah. It would be like if people started calling kilometers Meters but then dropped the capitalization and just called them meters. It is kind of stupid.

1 calorie (as in 1/1000th of a Calorie) is a unit of energy defined as the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram or 1 mL of water from room temp by 1 degree celsius. When applied to food though a bite of a sandwich would contain something like 20,000 calories so for food they use kilocalories so it is a more reasonable number (ie 20 kcal in that example) but just call it Calories I guess because kilocalorie sounds scary or something idk.

I don't understand the convention of capitalizing, but we make abbreviations for everything, because it's easier - "kilo" and "kg" are both short for "kilogram".

Yeah but they both contain the "k". For abbreviation of kilocalorie kcal makes sense, could see kc....but just calling it Calories is confusing.

Thing is the vast majority of people only use calories in reference to food and it makes sense to think in kcal then. Since the only application uses kcal then people just started calling that calories. Like I said it's exactly like if we only thought in terms of kilometers or kilograms and practically never used meters or grams and therefor just decided to call kilograms Grams and kilometers Meters but then after a while just dropped the caps and called them grams and meters.