What Is A Calorie?

The basic definition of a food calorie (yes, there's actually more than one kind of calorie) is the amount of energy required to raise one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. There's information on the Wikipedia page on calories. Basically it's a unit of energy.

Since it's a unit of energy, things other than food can be measured in calories. I just saw a story about a kid in China that wanted to be like his hero, Optimus Prime, so he drank gasoline. Unfortunately gasoline is not only rather poisonous to humans but I suppose it could be rather fattening if you could metabolize it...a gallon of gas contains 31,000 calories (technically, kilocalories).

So your car runs on calories. The neat thing is that you, like your car, can't use all the energy. Your car is only about 15 to 20 percent efficient (see here and here)...meaning that when you put ten bucks of gas into your car, eight of it will have nothing to do with propelling your vehicle. It disappears as friction and heat loss. Nice thought, eh?

Calories on labels are already estimated so they're inaccurate; that said, you don't get the full story from the label since your body can only metabolize food to certain degrees depending on how hard it is to convert to energy (digest it).

Confused?

Here's an example. Take about 100 calories of peanuts, a little bit of peanut oil, and a pinch of salt. Take the same amount of those items and mash them together...in case you didn't know, that's basically how you make homemade peanut butter. So you have 100 calories of nuts, and the equivalent as peanut butter.

Both contain 100 calories each. But if you ate them, you won't get 200 calories.

The peanut butter, with the softer texture, will allow your body to break it down more easily and absorb more of the calories; the harder nuts, less. The article cited studies that there's a variance of 5 to 20 percent from the current Atwater-based calorie scale.

Yikes!

I got to thinking about these items again after listening to part of an interview with the author of The End of Overeating, David Kessler. He mentioned in part about obesity today coinciding with foods that are...well, I'd say engineered, but that carries the connotation of genetic manipulation, so I'll just say foods that are targeted for consumer tastes. The food industry works on the same principals as the rest of our capitalistic economy; everyone wants to make more money and to do so they do everything possible to boost demand so we'll return and buy more. Part of this means filling foods with a trifecta of ingredients that actually stimulate certain parts of the brain and condition us to want more more more; salt, fat, and sugar.

This is of course combined with studies on creating attractive textures (oddly enough, usually it goes towards "soft"), aromas, packaging, etc...then the industry turns around and claims that it's the customer's fault if they overeat. They're supplying what there's demand for (makes sense, though, yeah? How can you make money if you create a cupcake that smells and tastes like sewage?)

We don't properly frame what we're eating in context. Do you know how much sugar you're eating when you eat pop tarts? I mean, you can read the numbers and gloss over them easily...but what if you actually saw the amount you're taking in? You can. Here's the website that shows you with sugar cubes. I'd like to try that with someone...just sit down with a baggie of sugar cubes and have someone eat that instead of whatever yummy concoction they were going to have, just to see if they would be so willing to do it.

Sugar, fat, and salt are added to foods to make them not only more palateable but also more attractive. Textures and smells are altered to make them more attractive. The last step is to make it socially acceptable to snack on them...voila! You have a formula for an upwards trend in obesity.

I know it seems as if I'm veering a little bit off topic, but it still ties back together. See, a calorie is a calorie. People don't like to think of it this way, but weight gain and loss (and maintenance) is a matter of you taking in X amount, and burning Y. If X is more than Y, you gain. If X is less than Y, you lose.

Now we know that certain properties of food affect how much of the calories you can extract, just like an internal combustion engine's efficiency affects how much energy is actually put to use from the gas you put in. Raw foods, hard foods, these make it harder to extract energy than softer, more tender prepared foods.

And now we have people in industries that for the last several decades have been perfecting the art of convincing you to eat these more attractive (and higher in metabolizable calorie) foods.

In other words...a population that doesn't care about what they're consuming has plenty of predators waiting to take advantage of ignorance, and we as a society don't care.

Maybe that'll give you something to think about before your next trip to Starbucks. Take a look at the nutrition information from their website or even iPhone/iPod applications that list nutrition information (or the online information from your hangouts of choice), then go to your kitchen and grab a tablespoon and pile up the appropriate amount of sugar on the counter. If you don't want to eat that pile of raw sugar, you might want to reconsider your choice of food when you go out.