Food Processing: A Calorie ISN'T A Calorie
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Egger29
Posts: 14,741 Member
There is a general thinking among these board that all you need to do is reduce your calories and you'll lose weight. While that may be partly true, what is most often omitted is any thought to the Type of foods we eat (and people wonder why they're not getting results).
What they're missing out on is the Thermal Effect of Food - That is, it takes energy to break down and digest the foods we eat. The more complex the source (whole foods), the more energy (calories) it takes to process it into the body. The more processed the food, the less energy it takes to digest.
The following article by Dr Helen Kollias outlines this in greater detail.
Food Processing: A Calorie Isn’t A Calorie - by Helen Kollias, (Published July 15th, 2011)
Summary: When is a calorie not a calorie? When it comes from from whole (versus processed) food. You see, digesting food costs energy. And we expend more energy/calories digesting whole foods than we do digesting processed foods. Thus, if you want to lose fat, choose whole foods as often as possible.
Most people have heaerd of Dr. Mark Haub, the nutrition professor who lost 27 pounds on the junk food diet. Great. As if the North American diet wasn’t bad enough, we’ve now got a nutrition professor promoting eating candy bars and Twinkies to lose weight.
He has two key points for his argument and experiment:
# 1) A calorie is a calorie is a calorie. For example, 100 calories from a candy bar and 100 calories from kale are the same.
# 2) If you eat fewer calories than you use, you will lose weight.
I can’t argue point #2 since it’s a basic law of thermodynamics, but point #1 is flawed in a few ways.
Thermal effect of food: Calories are a measure of energy. Weight change depends on the balance between two things: energy in versus energy out.
Energy out includes obvious things like:
- Physical activity (activity metabolism)
- Energy to keep you alive at rest (basal metabolic rate)
- Energy added to the body like amino acids to muscle, and fat to fat tissues
And less obvious things like:
- Energy lost in waste (feces and urine)
- Energy used to digest the food you eat
Energy in seems simple: How many calories were in the spinach salad, bagel or ice cream sandwich you ate? Turns out, energy in is just as complex as energy out, because of the energy cost of digesting food. That's right.....Digesting food costs energy!
Ever wonder how Celery can have Negative Calories? It takes more energy to break down and absorb the celery than the celery itself contains.
Eating costs calories: calories to chew, swallow, churn the stomach, make the acid in the stomach, make the enzymes, to make the rhythmic muscular contractions known as peristalsis that drive the food through, and so forth.
Scientists have three names for this phenomenon:
- Dietary-induced thermogenesis (DIT);
- Thermal effect of food (TEF); or
- Specific dynamic action (SDA).
On average, a person uses about 10% of their daily energy expenditure digesting and absorbing food, but this percentage changes depending on the type of food you eat. Protein takes the most energy to digest (20-30% of total calories in protein eaten go to digesting it). Next is carbohydrates (5-10%) and then fats (0-3%).
Thus, if you eat 100 calories from protein, your body uses 20-30 of those calories to digest and absorb the protein. You’d be left with a net 70-80 calories. Pure carbohydrate would leave you with a net 90-95 calories, and fat would give you a net 97-100 calories.
Hmm. Maybe “a calorie is a calorie” doesn’t hold up after all.
In the following study, it seems that not only does macronutrient content change TEF, but processing changes TEF:
Barr SB and Wright JC. - Postprandial energy expenditure in whole-food and processed-food meals: implications for daily energy expenditure. Food Nutr Res. 2010 Jul 2;54. doi: 10.3402/fnr.v54i0.5144. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20613890)
Methods - The study compared what happened when 17 volunteers ate a whole food meal versus a processed food meal. Volunteers were all of normal weight, and about 25 years old. Half were women.
The meals - The researchers use the term meals rather loosely, since these meals were cheese sandwiches. In this study, the metabolic impact of whole food sandwiches made of multi-grain bread and real cheddar cheese were compared to processed food sandwiches that were made with white bread and processed cheese product.
Though the researches call the sandwiches whole food and processed food, both are processed, but just to a different degree.
Table 1: Energy composition of the two test meals for 800 and 600 kcal portions
800 calorie portions
Whole food meal Processed food meal
Serving: 2 sandwiches Serving: 2 sandwiches
kcal: 800 (3,360 kJ) kcal: 800 (3,360 kJ)
Total fat: 35 g (39%) Total fat: 29 g (33%)
Total carbohydrate: 80 g (40%) Total carbohydrate: 99 g (50%)
Dietary fiber: 12 g Dietary fiber: <6 g
Sugars: 16 g Sugars: 16.5 g
Protein: 40 g (20%) Protein: 30 g (15%)
Total dry weight: 154 g Total dry weight: 158 g
600 calorie portions
Whole food meal Processed food meal
Serving: 1½ sandwiches Serving: 1½ sandwiches
kcal: 600 (2,520 kJ) kcal: 600 (2,520 kJ)
Total fat: 26 g (39%) Total fat: 22 g (33%)
Total carbohydrate: 60 g (40%) Total carbohydrate: 74 g (49%)
Dietary fiber: 9 g Dietary fiber: <4.5 g
Sugars: 12 g Sugars: 12.4 g
Protein: 30 g (20%) Protein: 23 g (15%)
Total dry weight: 116 g Total dry weight: 119 g
Eating and energy:
After not eating for 12 hours (overnight), researchers measured the volunteers’ basal metabolic rate using oxygen consumption. Then the volunteers were randomly given either a processed food sandwich or whole food sandwich (portion size was up to the volunteer). Then volunteers’ metabolic rate was measured every hour for six hours after the sandwich (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 hours post-sandwich).
2-6 days later, volunteers came back into the lab and did exactly the same thing, but with the other sandwich.
Results:
People tend to think healthier food tastes worse than less health food, but in this study the volunteers rated the whole food sandwiches as more palatable (6.5/10) compared to the processed food sandwiches (4.9/10), with no differences in how energetic they felt after eating the two sandwiches. And they felt no differences in fullness aka satiety (see Figure 1).
However, eating whole food took 46.8% more energy to digest on average than processed food!
The total energy (TEF) needed to digest and absorb a whole food sandwich was 576 kJ. The TEF for the processed food sandwich was 310 kJ.
What explains the differences? Protein and Fibre play a part.
In Table 1 above, we can see that the whole food sandwich had more had more protein (40 g) and fibre (12 g) than the processed food sandwich (30g protein and <6 g fibre). This explains the differences in TEF between sandwiches, but not entirely.
What you need to know:
When judging what’s “whole” and “processed” foods, ask yourself:
- What’s on the ingredient list?
- Do I recognize all these things?
- How many steps did this food take to get to me?
- Does this food come in a bag, box, or can?
For a real eye-opener, next time you’re at the grocery store, take a look at the ingredients of a few different brands of yogurt and compare the ingredients.
Good quality plain yogurt will have two ingredients: milk and bacteria.
Other so-called yogurts will have things like sodium citrate, corn starch, gelatin, pectin, calcium phosphate, potassium phosphate and sodium phosphate.
By the way, you might also be surprised to see what is in cream. Yep, plain old cream is often actually milk with cheap emulsifiers and sweeteners such as dextrose.
Read labels and buyer beware!
As Dr. Mark Haub showed, you can lose weight eating processed junk food. But he could have eaten a lot more whole food (that had important nutrients) and lost the same amount of weight.
If you didn’t have enough reasons to avoid processed food when losing weight, add reduced thermal effect of food to the list.
Processed food takes less energy to digest and absorb compared to whole foods, so 100 calories of processed food ends up being more net calories than 100 calories of whole food.
If you’re trying to Lose weight, eat whole foods. If you’re trying to Gain weight, you may find that you need to include a little more processed food for awhile.
And if your food normally comes in a tube… well, you might consider learning a few new cooking skills.
What they're missing out on is the Thermal Effect of Food - That is, it takes energy to break down and digest the foods we eat. The more complex the source (whole foods), the more energy (calories) it takes to process it into the body. The more processed the food, the less energy it takes to digest.
The following article by Dr Helen Kollias outlines this in greater detail.
Food Processing: A Calorie Isn’t A Calorie - by Helen Kollias, (Published July 15th, 2011)
Summary: When is a calorie not a calorie? When it comes from from whole (versus processed) food. You see, digesting food costs energy. And we expend more energy/calories digesting whole foods than we do digesting processed foods. Thus, if you want to lose fat, choose whole foods as often as possible.
Most people have heaerd of Dr. Mark Haub, the nutrition professor who lost 27 pounds on the junk food diet. Great. As if the North American diet wasn’t bad enough, we’ve now got a nutrition professor promoting eating candy bars and Twinkies to lose weight.
He has two key points for his argument and experiment:
# 1) A calorie is a calorie is a calorie. For example, 100 calories from a candy bar and 100 calories from kale are the same.
# 2) If you eat fewer calories than you use, you will lose weight.
I can’t argue point #2 since it’s a basic law of thermodynamics, but point #1 is flawed in a few ways.
Thermal effect of food: Calories are a measure of energy. Weight change depends on the balance between two things: energy in versus energy out.
Energy out includes obvious things like:
- Physical activity (activity metabolism)
- Energy to keep you alive at rest (basal metabolic rate)
- Energy added to the body like amino acids to muscle, and fat to fat tissues
And less obvious things like:
- Energy lost in waste (feces and urine)
- Energy used to digest the food you eat
Energy in seems simple: How many calories were in the spinach salad, bagel or ice cream sandwich you ate? Turns out, energy in is just as complex as energy out, because of the energy cost of digesting food. That's right.....Digesting food costs energy!
Ever wonder how Celery can have Negative Calories? It takes more energy to break down and absorb the celery than the celery itself contains.
Eating costs calories: calories to chew, swallow, churn the stomach, make the acid in the stomach, make the enzymes, to make the rhythmic muscular contractions known as peristalsis that drive the food through, and so forth.
Scientists have three names for this phenomenon:
- Dietary-induced thermogenesis (DIT);
- Thermal effect of food (TEF); or
- Specific dynamic action (SDA).
On average, a person uses about 10% of their daily energy expenditure digesting and absorbing food, but this percentage changes depending on the type of food you eat. Protein takes the most energy to digest (20-30% of total calories in protein eaten go to digesting it). Next is carbohydrates (5-10%) and then fats (0-3%).
Thus, if you eat 100 calories from protein, your body uses 20-30 of those calories to digest and absorb the protein. You’d be left with a net 70-80 calories. Pure carbohydrate would leave you with a net 90-95 calories, and fat would give you a net 97-100 calories.
Hmm. Maybe “a calorie is a calorie” doesn’t hold up after all.
In the following study, it seems that not only does macronutrient content change TEF, but processing changes TEF:
Barr SB and Wright JC. - Postprandial energy expenditure in whole-food and processed-food meals: implications for daily energy expenditure. Food Nutr Res. 2010 Jul 2;54. doi: 10.3402/fnr.v54i0.5144. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20613890)
Methods - The study compared what happened when 17 volunteers ate a whole food meal versus a processed food meal. Volunteers were all of normal weight, and about 25 years old. Half were women.
The meals - The researchers use the term meals rather loosely, since these meals were cheese sandwiches. In this study, the metabolic impact of whole food sandwiches made of multi-grain bread and real cheddar cheese were compared to processed food sandwiches that were made with white bread and processed cheese product.
Though the researches call the sandwiches whole food and processed food, both are processed, but just to a different degree.
Table 1: Energy composition of the two test meals for 800 and 600 kcal portions
800 calorie portions
Whole food meal Processed food meal
Serving: 2 sandwiches Serving: 2 sandwiches
kcal: 800 (3,360 kJ) kcal: 800 (3,360 kJ)
Total fat: 35 g (39%) Total fat: 29 g (33%)
Total carbohydrate: 80 g (40%) Total carbohydrate: 99 g (50%)
Dietary fiber: 12 g Dietary fiber: <6 g
Sugars: 16 g Sugars: 16.5 g
Protein: 40 g (20%) Protein: 30 g (15%)
Total dry weight: 154 g Total dry weight: 158 g
600 calorie portions
Whole food meal Processed food meal
Serving: 1½ sandwiches Serving: 1½ sandwiches
kcal: 600 (2,520 kJ) kcal: 600 (2,520 kJ)
Total fat: 26 g (39%) Total fat: 22 g (33%)
Total carbohydrate: 60 g (40%) Total carbohydrate: 74 g (49%)
Dietary fiber: 9 g Dietary fiber: <4.5 g
Sugars: 12 g Sugars: 12.4 g
Protein: 30 g (20%) Protein: 23 g (15%)
Total dry weight: 116 g Total dry weight: 119 g
Eating and energy:
After not eating for 12 hours (overnight), researchers measured the volunteers’ basal metabolic rate using oxygen consumption. Then the volunteers were randomly given either a processed food sandwich or whole food sandwich (portion size was up to the volunteer). Then volunteers’ metabolic rate was measured every hour for six hours after the sandwich (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 hours post-sandwich).
2-6 days later, volunteers came back into the lab and did exactly the same thing, but with the other sandwich.
Results:
People tend to think healthier food tastes worse than less health food, but in this study the volunteers rated the whole food sandwiches as more palatable (6.5/10) compared to the processed food sandwiches (4.9/10), with no differences in how energetic they felt after eating the two sandwiches. And they felt no differences in fullness aka satiety (see Figure 1).
However, eating whole food took 46.8% more energy to digest on average than processed food!
The total energy (TEF) needed to digest and absorb a whole food sandwich was 576 kJ. The TEF for the processed food sandwich was 310 kJ.
What explains the differences? Protein and Fibre play a part.
In Table 1 above, we can see that the whole food sandwich had more had more protein (40 g) and fibre (12 g) than the processed food sandwich (30g protein and <6 g fibre). This explains the differences in TEF between sandwiches, but not entirely.
What you need to know:
When judging what’s “whole” and “processed” foods, ask yourself:
- What’s on the ingredient list?
- Do I recognize all these things?
- How many steps did this food take to get to me?
- Does this food come in a bag, box, or can?
For a real eye-opener, next time you’re at the grocery store, take a look at the ingredients of a few different brands of yogurt and compare the ingredients.
Good quality plain yogurt will have two ingredients: milk and bacteria.
Other so-called yogurts will have things like sodium citrate, corn starch, gelatin, pectin, calcium phosphate, potassium phosphate and sodium phosphate.
By the way, you might also be surprised to see what is in cream. Yep, plain old cream is often actually milk with cheap emulsifiers and sweeteners such as dextrose.
Read labels and buyer beware!
As Dr. Mark Haub showed, you can lose weight eating processed junk food. But he could have eaten a lot more whole food (that had important nutrients) and lost the same amount of weight.
If you didn’t have enough reasons to avoid processed food when losing weight, add reduced thermal effect of food to the list.
Processed food takes less energy to digest and absorb compared to whole foods, so 100 calories of processed food ends up being more net calories than 100 calories of whole food.
If you’re trying to Lose weight, eat whole foods. If you’re trying to Gain weight, you may find that you need to include a little more processed food for awhile.
And if your food normally comes in a tube… well, you might consider learning a few new cooking skills.
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Replies
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common sense really, I would rather eat 5 bananas and 3 apples than a chocolate bar.
nice post tho0 -
Good article and well articulated. Thanks for posting!0
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bump0
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This is very interesting, and educational. Thanks for sharing this with us. Man oh man, I'll bet you burned a lot of calories typing it though. But very good..very good.0
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Well written. It gets so cnfusing trying to understand all this.0
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Amen!0
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*bump*
Good stuff, as always!0 -
Just read this entire post - very interesting, and important information! Thanks for posting
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Wholeheartedly agree - eat better and eat fresh - long term you cannot maintain weight loss if you don't. Thank you.0
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*Bump*0
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*Like*0
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Great article!! It's always nice to read about the science of things and why- thanks for the post.0
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Thanks so much for this article; explains thoroughly and quite logically the science behind your advice to me for increasing my protein ratio. Great stuff!0
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bump!0
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Thank you SO MUCH!! I have been saying this forever, I knew it was true, just didn't know why. I makes so much sense. Now I can explain it. Thank you, thank you.0
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Eh, I skimmed the article but there are definitely some wrong things in there:
1) There aren't negative calorie foods. I'm not sure how this myth started and I'm glad people are taking TEF (thermal effect of food) into consideration but you're not going to burn more calories digesting something than you do eating it. As much as I dislike Yahoo news, there was a big article on it a few days ago.
http://health.yahoo.net/articles/weight-loss/photos/8-calorie-burning-myths-debunked#0
2) You can't say a calorie isn't a calorie and then compare 100 calories of kale to 100 calories of a candy bar. When people say "calories are calories" they're referring to comparing foods of equal composition, not just calorie amount. Obviously no one is going to make their diet 2,000 calories of heavy whipping cream and then think calories are calories. However, assuming you're hitting your calorie goals, getting enough vitamins, minerals, fiber, essential fatty acids, protein, etc then eating calories from a candy bar aren't going to ruin your diet. It's just not going to happen and that 100 calories in that candy bar are going to be used to fuel your muscles and organs because of thermodynamics.
There are a couple other things in there that are pretty iffy but it's time for me to go mountain bike riding and then eat Ben and Jerry's ice cream afterwards while still losing weight and being healthy. But but but......that has sugar!!!! Yep.0 -
Eh, I skimmed the article but there are definitely some wrong things in there:
If you only "skimmed" the article then you can't be expected to understand the fundamentals or note any of the details of the published research explaining the facts which carries far more weight than Yahoo News. Sorry.0 -
Did you read the whole yahoo news article you just posted? Later in the "article" it actually references this study that we're talking about in this thread saying it takes 50% more energy to digest whole food vs. processed food and that not all calories are created equal.0
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Eh, I skimmed the article but there are definitely some wrong things in there:
If you only "skimmed" the article then you can't be expected to understand the fundamentals or note any of the details of the published research explaining the facts which carries far more weight than Yahoo News. Sorry.
Are you actually going to refute what I posted or just dismiss it because I only skimmed the article? Please point out what people think that 100 calories of a candy bar try to argue that it's the same as 100 calories of kale. When people usually argue that a calorie is a calorie, it's in reference to things that are similar. For instance, in a mixed meal of 1,000 calories, if you eat a piece of white bread vs a piece of brown bread, it's not going to matter. When fiber, protein, fat, vitamins, minerals, etc are all present, the 100 calories from one source isn't going to matter compared to another. This extremist argument that is being made here is just silly and doesn't help anyone.
Brb, gonna eat 5,000 calories of mayo today because all calories are the same!
^---no one is saying that crap
Also, please point out how the TEF means that more calories are burned than taken in. That doesn't even make sense.0 -
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