The new calorie packaging scheme - UK

Fuzzipeg wrote: »

Probably nutritional recomendations would be better information to be providing. Suggestions of how much/many fruits or vegetables one needs to achieve the recommended daily allowance of vit c, or suggestions for the amount of protein etc could be more helpful. Probably introducing people to the concept of our needing various minerals, most of us cover calcium needs daily but how many think selenium, zinc or even iodine, then there are so many other daily nutritional reqirements too. Its a real shame someone in the past decided there was no point in providing, Home Economics, Domestic Science classes and the like to our children was a good idea they enabled me to make a reasonable start at feeding myself. I know much of the teaching in the 1960's did not go into the finer details, scientific understading was not as detailed as it is today, I will say this, we were really in a much better position when it came to feeding ourselves than most of our young people are these days.

Providing calorific information may be fine for the majority with a healthy endocrine system but for those who have clinically identifiable damaged and medically determined problems which require an improved understanding of nutrition the proposed system could support their continued ignorance finally causing more distress. There are many other medical reasons why many become over weight, things from allergies and the growing multitude of intolerances people are enountering these because their bodies do not produce all the expected enzymes nor house all the usual/expected list of dietary microbes to keep the multiple expressions of inflamaiton at bay. Shouting its all a matter of calories consumed versus calories expended, just does not cut it for those people, they deserve greater scientific explantion and societal understanding rather than vilification.

lemurcat2 wrote: »

Carlos_421 wrote: »

lemurcat2 wrote: »

lynn_glenmont wrote: »

lemurcat2 wrote: »

swierzbik1 wrote: »

glassyo wrote: »

Lobsterboxtops wrote: »

I can see both sides to this. Weirdly it came up as a topic on askamanager.com a couple of weeks ago.

On the one hand I think it can help the problem of overestimating exercise calories burned. I was once in an informational talk by a dietician student at university who stated that it would require walking a football field to work off the calories of 1 m&m. Now I never fact checked that, but it has been something that put in perspective the relationship between calories and exercise.

On the other hand, until a person is ready to absorb the information it won’t do any good.

That dietician student needed to do more studying and less talking.

If he was talking purely about energy generated through movement he was right, better check before bashing on people. However when it comes to humans we constantly burn way more because of BMR and NEAT so yes the OVERALL calories burned by walking around football field are way way way higher however from purely physics perspective and kilocalories created from the power output then yes it would be equivalent to an m&m. When in doubt, always use 70%BMR 20%NEAT 10%EXERCISE of TDEE (this are not entirely accurate but work more all less for majority of population)

Closer to 2 M&Ms, even not counting what you will burn anyway. That's for someone of about 150 lb.

OK, but the original statement was "walking a football field" (which to me means walking the length of a football field), but it has morphed into "walking around football field," so if the latter is 2 M&Ms worth of calories, the former would be about a third of that (accounting for crossing the width of the field twice, as well as crossing the length twice).

I was basing what I said on walking across a football field, i.e. 300 ft.

Specifically, an M&M has about 3 calories.

Walking a km at a slow pace when you weigh 150 lb (68 kg) (not taking into account other cals you are burning in the same time just by being alive) burns 62 calories, according to that Runtastic calculator. 1 km is about 3281 ft. So a football field is about 10.9 football fields. Based on that, walking across the football field burns about 5.7 calories, or about 2 M&Ms.

To put that in terms more meaningful to me, one city block in my city = 660 feet. That means I can burn nearly 4 M&Ms just by walking a city block, which is a quite short distance (well, maybe closer to 3 or 3.5, since I'm less than 150 lb and I was rounding up). A single M&M just isn't many cals.

How many city blocks should I walk for precisely one cheekful of M&Ms though?
That's a serving size, right? One cheekful?

Of course. I believe that MFP's database has a cheekful as either 236 cals or 5 cals (this one also has 26 g of protein) or 2463 cals, so you should choose based on your personal cheek (I have the high protein one, I am sure). With that, you can do the math.