Does anyone else hate using kilojoules?

cyaneverfat

I wish the whole world used calories.

Lillymoo01

I am fine with using kilojoules but there is nothing stopping you from changing kilojoules to calories in your diary settings.

cyaneverfat

Lillymoo01 wrote: »

I am fine with using kilojoules but there is nothing stopping you from changing kilojoules to calories in your diary settings.

But most foods don't list calories on their packaging and it's a pain in the butt to constantly use google to find out how many calories are listed for it.

cyaneverfat

I prefer working with smaller numbers

Lillymoo01

I just read this which I found interesting. It appears that only the US and UK officially use calories as their unit of measure.
https://www.coca-colacompany.com/au/news/you-say-calorie--we-say-kilojoule-who-s-right-

Nony_Mouse

A quick cheat to get from kj to cal is divide by four. It's not accurate, as there are 4.2 kj to a calorie, but it's close enough.

Lillymoo01

cyaneverfat wrote: »

Lillymoo01 wrote: »

I am fine with using kilojoules but there is nothing stopping you from changing kilojoules to calories in your diary settings.

But most foods don't list calories on their packaging and it's a pain in the butt to constantly use google to find out how many calories are listed for it.

It would be easier if packaging using both. I certainly agree with you there. I go by the divide by 4 rule though for a rough estimate.

Lietchi

I'm curious, in what country are you, that they only use kJ?
Here in Belgium both kJ and kcal are mentioned on all the packages, but I've never heard anyone talk about kilojoules, everybody uses calories.

And I can't remember having seen kJ only labels while traveling (or at least not in those countries where we occasionally did our own food shopping).

yuko0407

Lietchi wrote: »

I'm curious, in what country are you, that they only use kJ?
Here in Belgium both kJ and kcal are mentioned on all the packages, but I've never heard anyone talk about kilojoules, everybody uses calories.

Yes, and the same in France and Italy.

Stockholm_Andy

Both here in Sweden too

babyluthi

NZ is Kj, though a very few things list both.
On here I use cals, but I still weigh in kg.

cyaneverfat

I live in New Zealand

Lolinloggen

EU uses both by law, that is in part due to historical reasons, and because some countries hold on to units that are not SI.
Within SI all units are traceable to some base units, Joule for energy being one.
Older units often have standard easy conversions. For instance deg Celcius has the same scale as Kelvin the SI unit, except that for Kelvin you add 273.15 to get to deg Celcius. The conversion to Fahrenheit is not linear and I have no clue what the numbers mean in relationship to C. I know it is based on body temperature or something.
Like calories the electron Volt (eV = 1.60217662 × 10-19 joules) is directly linked to Joules via a simple conversion, akin to calories. eV is used in particle physics to allow numbers to become a little larger.

Some countries have decided to move where possible to the SI system and kJ is one of them It takes a little getting used to. I always see these things in a similar vain to currency conversion between countries or even as we had in Europe when we moved to the Euro. It too quite a few years before people stopped converting Euro to Guilders here, but after a while you know and it is the new baseline. Same here.
It still means you have a budget of energy and you need to stay within it. That does not change.

john_not_typical

The conversion to Fahrenheit is not linear and I have no clue what the numbers mean in relationship to C.

The conversion from deg F to deg C is absolutely linear. I’m not sure what you mean.

cyaneverfat

john_not_typical wrote: »

The conversion to Fahrenheit is not linear and I have no clue what the numbers mean in relationship to C.

The conversion from deg F to deg C is absolutely linear. I’m not sure what you mean.

True, but we are not talking about temperature

john_not_typical

I am once again confused because deg F and deg C measure only temperature. If you know what an eV is it seems like you know what you’re talking about.