All calories are not necessarily equal
NikoM5
Posts: 488 Member
Replies
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Oh bummer....the link said the site was down for maintenance.....0
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I was able to read the first of 3 pages, then it told me the site was down for maintenance. Very interesting points and I don't doubt the validity of the authors claims one bit, though I fail to see a need (personally) to figure out EXACTLY how many calories my body takes from each thing I eat. I'm comfortable with the estimates we're given on food labels. But I can absolutely see why studying the subject is fascinating. I'm bummed out that I couldn't read the whole thing. :frown:
For anybody interested, here is page #1 of 3:At one particularly strange moment in my career, I found myself picking through giant conical piles of dung produced by emus—those goofy Australian kin to the ostrich. I was trying to figure out how often seeds pass all the way through the emu digestive system intact enough to germinate. My colleagues and I planted thousands of collected seeds and waited. Eventually, little jungles grew.
Clearly, the plants that emus eat have evolved seeds that can survive digestion relatively unscathed. Whereas the birds want to get as many calories from fruits as possible—including from the seeds—the plants are invested in protecting their progeny. Although it did not occur to me at the time, I later realized that humans, too, engage in a kind of tug-of-war with the food we eat, a battle in which we are measuring the spoils—calories—all wrong.
Food is energy for the body. Digestive enzymes in the mouth, stomach and intestines break up complex food molecules into simpler structures, such as sugars and amino acids that travel through the bloodstream to all our tissues. Our cells use the energy stored in the chemical bonds of these simpler molecules to carry on business as usual. We calculate the available energy in all foods with a unit known as the food calorie, or kilocalorie—the amount of energy required to heat one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. Fats provide approximately nine calories per gram, whereas carbohydrates and proteins deliver just four. Fiber offers a piddling two calories because enzymes in the human digestive tract have great difficulty chopping it up into smaller molecules.
Every calorie count on every food label you have ever seen is based on these estimates or on modest derivations thereof. Yet these approximations assume that the 19th-century laboratory experiments on which they are based accurately reflect how much energy different people with different bodies derive from many different kinds of food. New research has revealed that this assumption is, at best, far too simplistic. To accurately calculate the total calories that someone gets out of a given food, you would have to take into account a dizzying array of factors, including whether that food has evolved to survive digestion; how boiling, baking, microwaving or flambéing a food changes its structure and chemistry; how much energy the body expends to break down different kinds of food; and the extent to which the billions of bacteria in the gut aid human digestion and, conversely, steal some calories for themselves.
Nutrition scientists are beginning to learn enough to hypothetically improve calorie labels, but digestion turns out to be such a fantastically complex and messy affair that we will probably never derive a formula for an infallible calorie count.
A Hard Nut to Crack
The flaws in modern calorie counts originated in the 19th century, when American chemist Wilbur Olin Atwater developed a system, still used today, for calculating the average number of calories in one gram of fat, protein and carbohydrate. Atwater was doing his best, but no food is average. Every food is digested in its own way.
Consider how vegetables vary in their digestibility. We eat the stems, leaves and roots of hundreds of different plants. The walls of plant cells in the stems and leaves of some species are much tougher than those in other species. Even within a single plant, the durability of cell walls can differ. Older leaves tend to have sturdier cell walls than young ones. Generally speaking, the weaker or more degraded the cell walls in the plant material we eat, the more calories we get from it. Cooking easily ruptures cells in, say, spinach and zucchini, but cassava (Manihot esculenta) or Chinese water chestnut (Eleocharis dulcis) is much more resistant. When cell walls hold strong, foods hoard their precious calories and pass through our body intact (think corn).0 -
Can't read the link but again, another misleading title. Calories are a unit of energy, nothing more but the calories from different foods (macro's) are metabolized differently and effect body composition differently.........And of course TEF and digestibility generally messes with peoples heads.0
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There is no way to know exactly how much a person intakes down to the last calorie (or how much a person burns daily) so all we can do is estimate and adjust as needed. The calorie estimation used today is close enough that (baring medical conditions and crappy math skills) people can control their weight with them.
And that, I think, is good enough.0 -
Actually it's not close at all and could be revamped to be much more accurate, though differences between people would still persist0
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I am learning this lesson. Yes, from a scientific point of view a calorie is a unit of energy and technically they are all the "same".
That technicality doesnt annoy me as much as the word "carb". Did you know that EVERYTHING organic is made up of carbohydrates? Do you even know what a carbohydrate is? Its a chain of carbons and hydrogens. YOU are a carbohydrate. Vegetables are carbohydrates. Sugar is a carbohydrate. -- The way the diet community throws this word around drives me up the wall.
What this person and the article are talking about is not the technical definition of "calorie" but the actual nutritional content of the food you put into your body - and just about everyone who has some weight to lose is putting non-nutritional foods into their bodies, until they learn to eat better. I am finally learning that, and hopefully will be able to be successful now that I understand that its not about numbers - its about the nutrition!0 -
page 2
Some plant parts have evolved adaptations either to make themselves more appetizing to animals or to evade digestion altogether. Fruits and nuts first evolved in the Cretaceous (between 145 and 65 million years ago), not long after mammals were beginning to run between the legs of dinosaurs. Evolution favored fruits that were both tasty and easy to digest to better attract animals that could help plants scatter seeds. It also favored nuts and seeds that were hard to digest, however. After all, seeds and nuts need to survive the guts of birds, bats, rodents and monkeys to spread the genes they contain.
Studies suggest that peanuts, pistachios and almonds are less completely digested than other foods with similar levels of proteins, carbohydrates and fats, meaning they relinquish fewer calories than one would expect. A new study by Janet A. Novotny and her colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that when people eat almonds, they receive just 129 calories per serving rather than the 170 calories reported on the label. They reached this conclusion by asking people to follow the same exact diets—except for the amount of almonds they ate—and measuring the unused calories in their feces and urine.
Even foods that have not evolved to survive digestion differ markedly in their digestibility. Proteins may require as much as five times more energy to digest as fats because our enzymes must unravel the tightly wound strings of amino acids from which proteins are built. Yet food labels do not account for this expenditure. Some foods such as honey are so readily used that our digestive system is hardly put to use. They break down in our stomach and slip quickly across the walls of our intestines into the bloodstream: game over.
Finally, some foods prompt the immune system to identify and deal with any hitchhiking pathogens. No one has seriously evaluated just how many calories this process involves, but it is probably quite a few. A somewhat raw piece of meat can harbor lots of potentially dangerous microbes. Even if our immune system does not attack any of the pathogens in our food, it still uses up energy to take the first step of distinguishing friend from foe. This is not to mention the potentially enormous calorie loss if a pathogen in uncooked meat leads to diarrhea.
What's Cooking?
Perhaps the biggest problem with modern calorie labels is that they fail to account for an everyday activity that dramatically alters how much energy we get from food: the way we simmer, sizzle, sauté and otherwise process what we eat. When studying the feeding behavior of wild chimpanzees, biologist Richard Wrangham, now at Harvard University, tried eating what the chimps ate. He went hungry and finally gave in to eating human foods. He has come to believe that learning to process food—cooking it with fire and pounding it with stones—was a milestone of human evolution. Emus do not process food; neither, to any real extent, do any of the apes. Yet every human culture in the world has technology for modifying its food. We grind, we heat, we ferment. When humans learned to cook food—particularly, meat—they would have dramatically increased the number of calories they extracted from that food. Wrangham proposes that getting more energy from food allowed humans to develop and nourish exceptionally large brains relative to body size. But no one had precisely investigated, in a controlled experiment, how processing food changes the energy it provides—until now.
Rachel N. Carmody, a former graduate student in Wrangham's lab, and her collaborators fed adult male mice either sweet potatoes or lean beef. She served these foods raw and whole, raw and pounded, cooked and whole, or cooked and pounded and allowed the mice to eat as much as they wanted for four days. Mice lost around four grams of weight on raw sweet potatoes but gained weight on cooked potatoes, pounded and whole. Similarly, the mice retained one gram more of body mass when consuming cooked meat rather than raw meat. This reaction makes biological sense. Heat hastens the unraveling, and thus the digestibility, of proteins, as well as killing bacteria, presumably reducing the energy the immune system must expend to battle any pathogens.0 -
page 3
Carmody's findings also apply to industrial processing. In a 2010 study people who ate 600- or 800-calorie portions of whole-wheat bread with sunflower seeds, kernels of grain and cheddar cheese expended twice as much energy to digest that food as did individuals who consumed the same quantity of white bread and “processed cheese product.” Consequently, people snacking on whole wheat obtained 10 percent fewer calories.
Even if two people eat the same sweet potato or piece of meat cooked the same way, they will not get the same number of calories out of it. Carmody and her colleagues studied inbred mice with highly similar genetics. Yet the mice still varied in terms of how much they grew or shrank on a given diet. People differ in nearly all traits, including inconspicuous features, such as the size of the gut. Measuring people's colons has not been popular for years, but when it was the craze among European scientists in the early 1900s, studies discovered that certain Russian populations had large intestines that were about 57 centimeters longer on average than those of certain Polish populations. Because the final stages of nutrient absorption occur in the large intestine, a Russian eating the same amount of food as a Pole is likely to get more calories from it. People also vary in the particular enzymes they produce. By some measures, most adults do not produce the enzyme lactase, which is necessary to break down lactose sugars in milk. As a result, one man's high-calorie latte is another's low-calorie case of the runs.
People differ immensely as well in what scientists have come to regard as an extra organ of the human body—the community of bacteria living in the intestines. In humans, two phyla of bacteria, Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes, dominate the gut. Researchers have found that obese people have more Firmicutes in their intestines and have proposed that some people are obese, in part, because the extra bacteria make them more efficient at metabolizing food: so instead of being lost as waste, more nutrients make their way into the circulation and, if they go unused, get stored as fat. Other microbes turn up only in specific peoples. Some Japanese individuals, for example, have a microbe in their intestines that is particularly good at breaking down seaweed. It turns out this intestinal bacterium stole the seaweed-digesting genes from a marine bacterium that lingered on raw seaweed salads.
Because many modern diets contain so many easily digestible processed foods, they may be reducing the populations of gut microbes that evolved to digest the more fibrous matter our own enzymes cannot. If we continue to make our gut a less friendly environment for such bacteria, we may get fewer calories from tough foods such as celery.
Few people have attempted to improve calorie counts on food labels based on our current understanding of human digestion. We could tweak the Atwater system to account for the special digestive challenges posed by nuts. We could even do so nut by nut or, more generally, food by food. Such changes (which have unsurprisingly been supported by the Almond Board of California, an advocacy group) would, however, require scientists to study each and every food the same way that Novotny and her colleagues investigated almonds, one bag of feces and jar of urine at a time. Judging by the fda's regulations, the agency would be unlikely to prevent food sellers from adjusting calorie counts based on such new studies. The bigger challenge is modifying labels based on how items are processed; no one seems to have launched any efforts to make this larger change.
Even if we entirely revamped calorie counts, however, they would never be precisely accurate because the amount of calories we extract from food depends on such a complex interaction between food and the human body and its many microbes. In the end, we all want to know how to make the smartest choices at the supermarket. Merely counting calories based on food labels is an overly simplistic approach to eating a healthy diet—one that does not necessarily improve our health, even if it helps us lose weight. Instead we should think more carefully about the energy we get from our food in the context of human biology. Processed foods are so easily digested in the stomach and intestines that they give us a lot of energy for very little work. In contrast, veggies, nuts and whole grains make us sweat for our calories, generally offer far more vitamins and nutrients than processed items, and keep our gut bacteria happy. So it would be logical for people who want to eat healthier and cut calories to favor whole and raw foods over highly processed foods. You might call it the way of the emu.0 -
There is no way to know exactly how much a person intakes down to the last calorie (or how much a person burns daily) so all we can do is estimate and adjust as needed. The calorie estimation used today is close enough that (baring medical conditions and crappy math skills) people can control their weight with them.
And that, I think, is good enough.0 -
Oh goodie.
It's been at least 17 minutes since the last thread exactly like this thread.0 -
Can't read the link but again, another misleading title. Calories are a unit of energy, nothing more but the calories from different foods (macro's) are metabolized differently and effect body composition differently.........And of course TEF and digestibility generally messes with peoples heads.
Can't read the link but I'm going call the title misleading anyways! lol0 -
Actually it's not close at all and could be revamped to be much more accurate, though differences between people would still persist
If its not close at all then why does counting calories (uaing the estimations we have now) work?0 -
Oh goodie.
It's been at least 17 minutes since the last thread exactly like this thread.
Welcome to internet forums! Enjoy your stay.0 -
Actually it's not close at all and could be revamped to be much more accurate, though differences between people would still persist
If its not close at all then why does counting calories (uaing the estimations we have now) work?
Accuracy vs consistency0 -
Oh goodie.
It's been at least 17 minutes since the last thread exactly like this thread.
Welcome to internet forums! Enjoy your stay.
Bad jokes don't get funnier with frequent retelling.0 -
There is no way to know exactly how much a person intakes down to the last calorie (or how much a person burns daily) so all we can do is estimate and adjust as needed. The calorie estimation used today is close enough that (baring medical conditions and crappy math skills) people can control their weight with them.
And that, I think, is good enough.
Overly complicate things? It's just information, don't fear it.0 -
Yes, they are exactly equal. Just like all volts are equal, all gallons are equal, all inches are equal. All are units of measure. This really isn't hard.0
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The gist of the article is that we don't quite get exactly 4 calories from all carbs, etc. It's pretty much nonsense. Yes, calorie counts aren't 100% accurate, but science and experience proves over and over that they're pretty darn close.0
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Actually it's not close at all and could be revamped to be much more accurate, though differences between people would still persist
If its not close at all then why does counting calories (uaing the estimations we have now) work?
Accuracy vs consistency
I'm gonna stick with "estimates are good enough."0 -
I am learning this lesson. Yes, from a scientific point of view a calorie is a unit of energy and technically they are all the "same".
That technicality doesnt annoy me as much as the word "carb". Did you know that EVERYTHING organic is made up of carbohydrates? Do you even know what a carbohydrate is? Its a chain of carbons and hydrogens. YOU are a carbohydrate. Vegetables are carbohydrates. Sugar is a carbohydrate. -- The way the diet community throws this word around drives me up the wall.
What this person and the article are talking about is not the technical definition of "calorie" but the actual nutritional content of the food you put into your body - and just about everyone who has some weight to lose is putting non-nutritional foods into their bodies, until they learn to eat better. I am finally learning that, and hopefully will be able to be successful now that I understand that its not about numbers - its about the nutrition!
This is.. inaccurate. Everything isn't simply made up of carbohydrates, and carbohydrates are not just things made of carbons and hydrogen. A steak has virtually zero carbohydrates, so it's obviously inaccurate to say cows are made of carbohydrates. Proteins are made of nitrogen-containing amino acids and are not carbohydrates. Cell membranes are made of lipids that are not carbohydrates. Etc etc. In nature carbohydrates are used primarily as either an energy storage method (sugars, starch) or provide structure (cellulose, chitin). But fats and proteins, which make up large portions of all living organisms - including you and me - are not carbohydrates. By mass, we have more protein and fat than carbohydrates in our bodies. Muscle, bone, skin, blood - these things are not carbohydrates.0 -
This is a fascinating article. The difference between 129 calories and 170 calories is huge over time. That difference in calories every day for a year is a difference in 4 pounds. Over 5 years, that's 20 pounds. This really motivates me to eat more unprocessed foods.0
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This is a fascinating article. The difference between 129 calories and 170 calories is huge over time. That difference in calories every day for a year is a difference in 4 pounds. Over 5 years, that's 20 pounds. This really motivates me to eat more unprocessed foods.
Except it's really not significant. The human body has the ability to compensate one way or another to account for small differences in calorie intakes. 30 calories a day is not going to translate into 20 pounds over the course of a few years.0 -
I'd love to hear more about that Jonnythan. How does it compensate? Why does it compensate?0
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I'd love to hear more about that Jonnythan. How does it compensate? Why does it compensate?
I'm not too familiar with the concept and I don't have any links handy. I do know however that the body has a host of things it does in order to make small changes to metabolism over the course of hours, days, weeks. Little things like small amounts of movement (leg shaking, moving around in your chair, etc), a little extra heat generated here or there, etc. can definitely add up to make up for these types of inaccuracies. Calories out isn't some static number.0 -
bump0
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the article doesn't sound like it was written by a graduate student. The variables that factor into our digestion and metabolism are already factored into experimental data from results, so I don't see how that isn't accounted for? At some point even the old BMR and RMR equations were derived from experimental data that is inclusive of all these different variables as an average. From there you can setup a bench mark and tailor your own specific metabolic rate with a little trial and error. no need to stress out whether our metabolism has evolved genes that cause a lack of specific enzymes that can digest certain foods or not.
Also, calories in labels, are the amount of calories in the food as packaged. if you drain the meat with a fat drain grill, yes the calorie count will be different, but that is also common knowledge, you just need to make minor adjustments to the standard labeling. it's kind of like trying to argue that the % values on nutrition labels are "wrong" because we're not all on 2,000 calorie diets and their is no such thing as an average 2,000 calorie diet. The label is not there to predict the diet you're on.
The article makes way too many references and comes up with the argument that thing's aren't that simple. Although true, for what we are wanting to do, that's all that is necessary. Absolute values in an energy balance are not important because we're trying to figure out the change, so as long as you can get a base line number to start with, you'll have a way to measure progress. Normally, consuming foods wouldn't be an issue with the human diet since our body has already evolved do digest whole foods. The BMR and RMR might need to be updated with all of today's current processed foods, but doing it at home from a trial and error standpoint would be much more accurate after getting a base number from the current BMR and RMR equations. That will give you the bench mark and starting point, which is the best thing we can do since the equations will always be an average, at best.
When it comes to food intake, chewing too much will reduce the amount of total calories your body can utilize for metabolism, and cooking will make chewing and digestion much easier to eat more of those carbs. which could cause a greater insulin spike and urge to want to eat more later...there's a bunch of correlations that can be made for the lab mice experiments. These are all just energy conversions that eventually lead to natural homeostasis. The less you cook the food, the more you retain the nutritional value that will naturally help metabolize and digest the food in the first place through "homeostasis" in the form of pressure and concentration gradients. Example, you have more potassium from raw foods, and potassium gives you the ability to completely contract your muscles which as a result consumes more calories through a fuller range of motion.
All calories are equal by definition, that is the first law of thermodynamics. A carbohydrate is a molecule different from, fats, and proteins, although I see the reference that's being made in one of the comments. Carbon is "the organic element" absolutely necessary for life. It originates from the death of a sun, or a star but it is found in fats, proteins, carbohydrates, DNA, RNA, enzymes, just about all biological/organic molecules with probably very few exceptions as far as I know. In chemistry, organic chemistry means carbon chemistry. When it comes to molecules, water is what makes up most of our weight, then the other macro molecules. Oxygen, Carbon and hydrogen elements are the most abundant of all elements in our body,
www.linkedin.com/pub/leonardo-lopez-jr/38/2a7/532/0 -
Yes, they are exactly equal. Just like all volts are equal, all gallons are equal, all inches are equal. All are units of measure. This really isn't hard.
They not NOT equal in terms of how the body processes them. This really isn't hard.0 -
Yes, they are exactly equal. Just like all volts are equal, all gallons are equal, all inches are equal. All are units of measure. This really isn't hard.
They not NOT equal in terms of how the body processes them. This really isn't hard.
The issue of energy is separate from the issue of nutrients and processing.
In terms of energy, which calorie is a unit of, calories are calories. The nutrients from which you get your calories affect many things, but weight - which is determined by energy balance - is not one of them.0 -
I appreciate your effort Niko, but most people around here insist on plugging their ears and repeating "a calorie is a calorie" while rocking back and forth in the corner. Anything that threatens that sneering simplicity is evil and foolish and should be put down.
Thermic effect? pointless!
Nutrient Timing? witchcraft...
Metabolic Processes? stop splitting hairs MORON :P
It should be blindingly obvious that the intended use of "Calorie" in this discussion is "The nutritional calories inherent in the food that you eat." Everybody knows and understands this, there is no actual confusion.0 -
I appreciate your effort Niko, but most people around here insist on plugging their ears and repeating "a calorie is a calorie" while rocking back and forth in the corner. Anything that threatens that sneering simplicity is evil and foolish and should be put down.
Thermic effect? pointless!
Nutrient Timing? witchcraft...
Metabolic Processes? stop splitting hairs MORON :P
Thermic effect and nutrient timing have been pretty well established as totally insignificant. "Metabolic processes" sounds incredibly vague so I'm not sure what you're referring to there.0
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