Is a calorie a calorie ?

annecolorgreen

I think that both are true. That may seem paradoxical, but I don't believe it is.

I also think that each BODY is unique in how it reacts to different types of food/exercise/calories. We have to find the correct formula for our body.

~~anne

Funnydream

Annecolourgreen - I think you are correct. And that's exactly what I'm trying to do, find my body specific formula.

Gale - C. Thanks for that. I think that *for some people* it's a very delicate balance, and we have to get it *just* right for us as individuals. At least you know what formula works for you.

canstey

I don't believe simply "A calorie is a calorie" but rather in the scientific method of hypothesis and test. From my research into real studies rather than simply personal or anecdotal evidence, the data supports "a calorie is a calorie" when it comes to weight management. This is not the same thing is a healthy diet and blurring the line between the two is what the entire diet industry does to make you think "Not all calories are the same and therefore if you eat <insert diet plan here> you don't need to count calories if you stick to our foods."

Here are four links to studies that were done comparing different diet types (low/high protein, carbs). All four show that regardless of diet type, weight loss between groups was the same. Now these studies were more about if one diet type made people healthier for the few things they were measuring but be careful about jumping to any conclusions. They all simply started to look at the differences but never followed people from overweight to ideal weight to see if the initial differences were maintained at ideal weight or did both groups wind up in the same place.

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/81/6/1298
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/short/ajcn.2008.27326v1
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15632335
http://www.annals.org/content/140/10/778.full.pdf+html

The following link is a personal favorite because it is a study to see if fructose in the diet is worse than complex carbohydrates. Now the study isn't about weight management at all but many low-carb proponents claim High Fructose Corn Syrup is directly responsible for obesity as if it is more fattening than the calories it contains. The study shows that the participants did not gain weight when given 25% of their maintenance calories as fructose (equivalent of 2-4 cans of soda a day). The health markers the study was looking at were worse but that wasn't the point of this thread.

http://ddr.nal.usda.gov/bitstream/10113/22238/1/IND44124650.pdf

So when someone claims that not all calories are the same when it comes to weight management, ask them for a study or two that shows this.

recipe4success

I don't believe simply "A calorie is a calorie" but rather in the scientific method of hypothesis and test. From my research into real studies rather than simply personal or anecdotal evidence, the data supports "a calorie is a calorie" when it comes to weight management. This is not the same thing is a healthy diet and blurring the line between the two is what the entire diet industry does to make you think "Not all calories are the same and therefore if you eat <insert diet plan here> you don't need to count calories if you stick to our foods."

Here are four links to studies that were done comparing different diet types (low/high protein, carbs). All four show that regardless of diet type, weight loss between groups was the same. Now these studies were more about if one diet type made people healthier for the few things they were measuring but be careful about jumping to any conclusions. They all simply started to look at the differences but never followed people from overweight to ideal weight to see if the initial differences were maintained at ideal weight or did both groups wind up in the same place.

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/81/6/1298
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/short/ajcn.2008.27326v1
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15632335
http://www.annals.org/content/140/10/778.full.pdf+html

The following link is a personal favorite because it is a study to see if fructose in the diet is worse than complex carbohydrates. Now the study isn't about weight management at all but many low-carb proponents claim High Fructose Corn Syrup is directly responsible for obesity as if it is more fattening than the calories it contains. The study shows that the participants did not gain weight when given 25% of their maintenance calories as fructose (equivalent of 2-4 cans of soda a day). The health markers the study was looking at were worse but that wasn't the point of this thread.

http://ddr.nal.usda.gov/bitstream/10113/22238/1/IND44124650.pdf

So when someone claims that not all calories are the same when it comes to weight management, ask them for a study or two that shows this.

Totally agree, excellent post and good articles.

July24Lioness

I think you are mixing weight management and healthy eating too much and it leads people to assume incorrectly that if you eat healthy foods, calories don't count. This is what low-carb diet proponents do; imply without ever actually stating it that the types of food matter more than calories.

Calories in - calories out isn't a concept, it is a fact from physics. There is some small amount of difference in calories consumed by digestion between different types of food but it isn't worth taking into account and saying "Since nuts take more calories to digest, I should only count 90% of the calories in nuts but 100% of the calories in the twinkie". Study after study shows that when calories are controlled, regardless of the quality of the calories weight management results are the same and they did not attempt to compensate for difference in energy required to digest. It just doesn't make enough of a difference. There are some studies that suggest the breakdown of macro nutrients may have an impact on body composition when calories are the same but they are incomplete to come to that conclusion yet.

I totally agree with you that healthy balanced eating is the way to go but that does not negate that eating an excess of calories, whether healthy or not, leads to weight gain. If you follow "Calories always count and they all count the same" you will not be lead astray even if that is only a 99% accurate statement. Then you combine that with "Eating healthy foods and minimizing the amount of processed foods in your diet will help you have a healthier body" and you have a winning combination.

If you think a calorie is a calorie, is a calorie then explain this to me..............

Why is it that when I do a low carb plan that I can eat upwards of 1800 - 2000 calories a day of high fat, moderate protein, low carb and lose weight effortlessly????? I barely exercised here.............

And why is it is I do a 1200 calorie with low fat, lower protein and higher carbs that I gain weight???? And exercised a lot here.

I believe in Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. It is really worth the read!!

stormieweather

I'm going to disagree about the HFCS - http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/

Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.

Kasuko

You guys are on way too much of a "this side vs that side" debate here. Which is totally unnecessary because the original explanation didn't state a side.

What you have to realize is weight loss exists right in the middle. Once you go to one of the extreme's the other side's argument breaks. That's because both sides are using far to simple of an explanation to truly explain weight loss, in fact there really is no way to explain weight loss, but thats OK!

When we live in the middle, healthy foods + healthy deficit all the theories hold up well enough and that is all that counts. No one can say that as long as you count calories the food doesn't matter and no one can say as long as you eat healthy foods the calories don't matter. This isn't a fast and hard equation. This is a delicate bodily function, one governed by several factors that aren't even being considered here. How many of you are considering the amount of protein required to build hair, fingernails and skin cells etc?

We all have to agree to disagree here. We all have to live in the middle and admit that healthy food AND healthy intake is the best way to lose weight (I'm talking real weight here).

PJilly

You guys are on way too much of a "this side vs that side" debate here. Which is totally unnecessary because the original explanation didn't state a side.

What you have to realize is weight loss exists right in the middle. Once you go to one of the extreme's the other side's argument breaks. That's because both sides are using far to simple of an explanation to truly explain weight loss, in fact there really is no way to explain weight loss, but thats OK!

When we live in the middle, healthy foods + healthy deficit all the theories hold up well enough and that is all that counts. No one can say that as long as you count calories the food doesn't matter and no one can say as long as you eat healthy foods the calories don't matter. This isn't a fast and hard equation. This is a delicate bodily function, one governed by several factors that aren't even being considered here. How many of you are considering the amount of protein required to build hair, fingernails and skin cells etc?

We all have to agree to disagree here. We all have to live in the middle and admit that healthy food AND healthy intake is the best way to lose weight (I'm talking real weight here).

I am going to agree to agree with you! :happy:

canstey

If you think a calorie is a calorie, is a calorie then explain this to me..............

Why is it that when I do a low carb plan that I can eat upwards of 1800 - 2000 calories a day of high fat, moderate protein, low carb and lose weight effortlessly????? I barely exercised here.............

And why is it is I do a 1200 calorie with low fat, lower protein and higher carbs that I gain weight???? And exercised a lot here.

I believe in Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. It is really worth the read!!

By your own admission you are not a healthy person and therefore your personal situation does not apply to healthy people. Your argument is equivalent to a person allergic to citrus claiming "Citrus fruit makes me ill so therefore no one should eat citrus and to get your vitamins you should eat something else if you want to be healthy and prevent vitamin deficiencies."

Gary Taubes is a very interesting case. He does have some good points to say about some subjects like exercise isn't the direct cause of weight loss or even necessary for weight loss but he is one of the worst offenders at distortion and blurring the line between weight management and healthy eating. He blasts scientists of the '60s for claiming heart disease is caused by high fat because they looked where heart disease was highest and then assumed their diets were the cause because they were almost all higher in fat. So he correctly argues that correlation is not sufficient for cause and effect but then uses correlation himself to prove low-carb is a better diet by looking and the diet of lean people and saying it must be their diet.

Here is a link to a paper Gary Taubes wrote defending Good Calories, Bad Calories from a book review turned diatribe from Dr. Bray about how Taubes book is full of junk. If you read the defense with a neutral stance, you can see how Taubes dances around without actually defending himself.

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/taubes-response-to-bray-ob-reviews.pdf

Two highlights from the defense.

Regarding obesity, Bray makes his first critical factual error in the second
sentence of his abstract. He asserts that I believe 'that you can gain
weight and become obese without a positive energy balance'. This
statement implies that I do not believe in the first law of thermodynamics.
It could not be further from the truth. In GCBC, I point out that the first
law – energy conservation – tells us nothing about what causes obesity.

So here Taubes does state that he does believe in calories in - calories out and is not arguing against it.

Bray repeatedly dismisses my observation that positive energy balance
tells us nothing meaningful about weight regulation by referring to it with
the rhetorically loaded phrase 'calories don't count'. He then cites
Kinsell's 1964 article –'Calories Do Count'– as showing 'clearly' that
calories, not nutrient composition, play the critical factor in weight loss.
Bray neglects to add Kinsell's own observation that carbohydraterestricted
diets inhibit hunger in a way that calorie-restricted diets do not.

So to defend his position that not all calories are the same, he references the quintessential book on the fact that all calories are the same and simply states: "But low-carb diets are easier to stick with" and that appears to be true from research but again has nothing to do with not all calories are the same.

So the only argument Taubes has left and goes on and on about it is that since he agrees calories are calories and it takes eating more calories than expending to gain weight, it must be that certain diets change a person's BMR so they burn fewer calories than expected. Everything he says in the defense is about how fat people are eating the same total calories so their must be something different in their BMR and he constantly points at their diet as the cause of hormonal imbalance. This is a totally worthy sentiment that should be tested. Taubes could do his own study in less than six months to prove this and show the world he is right but he hasn't. The studies that do test the effect of different diets like the 5 links I posted before and especially the Fructose study link, show that diet does not change the BMR of a healthy person because the subjects did not have to change their calorie intake to adjust for a lowering BMR or a hormonal imbalance.

Edit-
I would like to add that there is nothing to indicate different people don't have different BMR for the same weight, musculature, and frame size and there seems to be plenty of evidence that they do. My point is those who argue that it is diet that causes this difference could easily prove they are right by studying whether a person's BMR changes if they change their diet. This is a really simple and easily done study. All studies I have found that effectively do this but are not directly measuring BMR indicate that diet does not change BMR. So it is totally consistent to show that a calorie is a calorie and that two people that are very similar in build and lifestyle eating the same number of calories have different weights. Taubes does ask the right question "Why does this happen?" but then starts theorizing about things that studies indicate are not true and selling books rather than doing real research to answer the question.

PJilly

All very interesting...

Funnydream

"We all have to agree to disagree here. We all have to live in the middle and admit that healthy food AND healthy intake is the best way to lose weight (I'm talking real weight here)."

Too right.....

Canstey - thanks for such a broad review .........very, very interesting reading!

July24Lioness

Dr Bray in my opinions is very uncredible. You are entitled to believe what you want to believe.

I am living proof of Dr Taubes, Dr Atkins, Weston Price and a host of others that have proven time and time again that calories are not equal.

When I eat a diet full of natural fats (Yes, saturated fats included), protein, vegetables and some fruit. My body functions properly in every form and fashion, inside and out..............I have lots of energy to exercise, sleep well and just an over all feeling of wellness.

The whole weight loss scenario is not as simple as calories in, calories out.

The whole calorie thing is dependent on the QUALITY of calories you put in your body, not the QUANTITY.

I proved to myself that I can eat upwards of 2,000 calories a day and lose weight fine doing higher fat, moderate protein and lower carbs, than I can on a low to moderate calorie, higher carb plan......................i didn't even believe my own doctor when he first started telling me this back in 2003. I had to research it, read it and learn it for myself............

Case in point...............

A calorie is a Calorie violates the second law of thermodynamics................

http://www.nutritionj.com/content/3/1/9

Stewie316

Very interesting read. I do agree that a calorie is a calorie.