Is a calorie a calorie?

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  • NorthCascades
    NorthCascades Posts: 10,970 Member
    lauragreenbaum wrote: »
    I'm on a roll today, but I just read this from someone who made this comment. I just saw "Fed Up" and one of the things I found interesting was that two calories may not be the same. The example they used was, if you eat 160 calories of almonds, there is a lot of fiber and protein in that so it takes longer to digest and the whole process burns some of those calories. Whereas, if you drink a 160 calorie Coke, it's almost all sugar which goes straight to your organs that process it and the body can do nothing with all that sugar other than convert it to fat. Thoughts?

    Let's say I go for a walk to get my steps in, and find a $20 bill on the sidewalk. No one is walking around looking for anything, so score!! Now, what am I going to do with my newfound riches?

    I could give it to charity, there are people starving in this world. I could buy a pair of gloves, mine have a hole in them and winter is coming, like Game of Thrones. Or I could even spend it on drugs, they legalized marijuana in my state and people buy it in stores now.

    If I give it to charity something good will come of it, like eating almonds and getting fiber. Buying drugs would be a waste, like the sugar without nutrients in your example.

    But all dollars have the same worth (purchasing power).

    If I want to buy a house and retire, I should focus on budgeting my money, because a penny saved is a penny earned. If I want to lose weight, I should focus on budgeting my calories, because like dollars, all calories have the same effect on my weight. If I want to be healthy I should eat well and not abuse drugs.

    And there's the rub: knowledge is useful to help you achieve your goals, and how you go about that depends what you're trying to do.
  • hixa30
    hixa30 Posts: 274 Member
    I tend to think of a person as closed system which oxidises the chemicals we eat, producing water, carbon dioxide, urea (and a few other chemicals) and energy which gets converted to heat, either inside the body or outside (such as in an exercise machine). Any unoxidised material gets passed through the body and flushed down the toilet. That might be seeds, apple stalks etc.

    Suppose a person eats a substance which requires a large amount of energy to digest, such as protein. The net effect is the same, it doesn't matter how many organic chemical pathways (Google image it) are required, how many hormones etc are needed. If you start off at one chemical (protein), you can take one of many thousands of pathways and the energy produced will be the same once you arrive at water, carbon dioxide and urea. I know this because if you were able to create different amounts of energy, depending on which pathway you used, you'd be able to create unlimited energy by going down one pathway (which produced more energy) and going back the other pathway (which produced less energy) in the opposite direction.
  • staticsplit
    staticsplit Posts: 538 Member
    Gut research is promising but still very recent. There is too much we don't know with certainty while they do more long-term studies.

    Forums are about debate. And just because they are citing medical knowledge backed up by much longer studies around calories doesn't make them uninformed.
  • J72FIT
    J72FIT Posts: 5,948 Member
    I think we should start saying Energy in Energy out instead of Calories in Calories out. Using the word calories seems to confuse many....

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