'You Don't Know What a Calorie Is?'

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[quote]krebcycle wrote:

That was an interesting read. One thought I have though is why would you want to account for the calories required to digest food in counting the calories a certain food has? Isn’t that more appropriately factored into some count of how many calories you burn in a day?

What I mean is that sure, if a certain food otherwise has 500 calories and it takes 50 calories to digest it, why say that the food really has 450 calories? It doesn’t, it has 500. The 50 calories it takes to digest food is better placed under basal metabolic rate or something. IE, we shouldn’t be taking digestion into account when we label foods, but rather when we make estimate for calculating BMR.

Of course as the article points out the caloric cost of digesting food varies from food to food, but it seems like one could reasonably make some sort of averages.

But anyway… back to the point at hand, lol. If your average person doesn’t even understand the concept of a calorie, how the hell are they suppose to understand this sort of stuff?

22

[quote]JGerman wrote:
SergeantQ wrote:
IMO, people underestimate calories. For example, if one were to eat a half a pizza, the common misconception maybe to “run it off” the next day. heck, they just took in 1000 calories, then I need to do a 1000 calories worth of work. A lot people are having problems understanding how their body responds to certain food and workouts and are looking for that “One diet, fits all” to cure their bad eating habits or help compensate for their lack of nutritional knowledge. If this is the case, than it is not a suprise that the average person does not know what a calorie is.

Big difference between kcal (kilocalorie) and calorie.

Kcals are calulated coverting grams of P, C, and F. Calories on food labels and cardio machines are worthless. [/quote]

That was the whole point of the statement; to take an objectionable viewpoint from a “Standard Mary or Joe” viewpoint. The semantics of calculating what a Kcal or calorie is not the issue nor is the calculation of what calorie is. Besides, the difference between Kcal and calorie is a factor of 1000. Protein, Carbs and Fat typically carry certain caloric value;
Macronutrient Calories Kilojoules
Protein 4 16.7
Fat 9 37.7
Carbohydrate 4 16.7

These are the accepted values. In addition, If you check a food label you may find that the total number of calories listed doesn’t match the number you arrive at using the 4-9-4 method described above. The reason for the discrepancy may be that the figure for carbohydrates includes insoluble fiber, and the food manufacturer has accounted for this in their figure for calories.

Insoluble fiber passes through your body without being converted to a form that provides energy, or calories. Knowing this, the manufacturer may subtract the caloric value of the insoluble fiber (4 calories per gram) from the total calories figure. When they do this, the 4-9-4 method will give you a higher figure for total calories than the one you find on the food label.

Finally, as dictated by our government, Calorie content values (in kcal) required by the regulation shall be calculated based on a reasonable basis. â??Reasonable basisâ?? means any reliable and verifiable calorie analysis of the menu item, which may include the use of nutrient databases, laboratory testing, cookbooks, or other reliable and verifiable methods of analysis, and shall be rounded to the nearest ten (10) calories for calorie content values above 50 calories and to the nearest five (5) calories for calorie content values 50 calories and below.

Now, add this into everyone’s calculation and then try to determine how many calories one is taking in on a daily basis knowing that companies round.