
Why Calorie Counts Are All Wrong - DanBC
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-reveals-why-calorie-counts-are-all-wrong/
======
randlet
For the purpose of losing weight it really doesn't matter if the calorie
counts are accurate or not: consistency is what is important.

If you want to lose weight reliably, track your weight and your caloric intake
_consistently_. If you aren't losing weight, adjust your caloric intake until
you are losing weight at a steady ~1-2lb per week.

Losing weight is simple...it's not easy, but it's very simple.

edit: You also should continually track this because as you lose weight, your
body uses less energy and your maintenance level goes down meaning you may
need to adjust your calories down a bit to compensate.

~~~
jaequery
I don't know, if losing weight is so simple, I'd assume obesity rates won't be
as high as 80% in USA during the "diet/health" craze phase we have going on.
Theres gotta be other factors that we just don't know about, like
metabolization, which will be ultimately what drives obesity down.

~~~
mikeash
It's key in how he summarizes it at the end: "it's not easy, but it's very
simple."

Losing weight isn't complicated. Eat less, move more. That's it.

Losing weight is extremely _difficult_. The drive to eat is a fundamental
instinct. That instinct isn't calibrated for constant easy availability of
food. We inherently want to eat more than is good for us in an environment of
abundance. Fighting that requires a great deal of willpower, which is a
limited resource.

Successful weight loss comes down to figuring out how to reduce your intake
and increase your movement without requiring more willpower than you can
actually muster. This is really hard. But losing weight is still _simple_.

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cjensen
They say "all wrong" but they appear to mean "not perfectly accurate." Given
that calorie counting is one of the most successful methods for gaining
control of weight, that's not just semantics; that's unethical.

~~~
chmaynard
The author is to blame for this unfortunate headline. "Humans engage in a kind
of tug-of-war with the food we eat, a battle in which we are measuring the
spoils--calories--all wrong."

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nothis
Interesting, but still mostly fiddling with details and niche cases. I found
that simply "counting calories" (more like roughly keeping track of them in
the back of my head) as written on the labels and then reducing my daily
consumption by 25-30% to be the only reliable way to lose weight. No hassle,
you can eat what you want and you aren't even that hungry. Those labels might
be off by 10% or even 30+% at times but, ultimately, that should barely
matter.

~~~
jerf
That doesn't make sense. If calories are all that matter, then simple math
shows that being off by 2% over the course of the years easily leads to weight
loss or gains. You've seen this math numerous times in the context of "if you
just didn't eat one donut hole a day you'd weight X pounds less a year". If
the labels are off by 10% or 30%, then it can't be just "calories are all that
matter"; you'd be losing or gaining a dozen pounds a year, _unexpectedly_ vs.
what your projections expected.

If, of course, the body is a dynamic process that reacts to what it encounters
in the world, then of course the dynamic reaction is what dominates the
situation, not percentages of error in calorie counting.

(The way the nutritionists managed to turn "The body reacts dynamically to
incoming input" into unthinkable heresy in favor of a model in which the body
is essentially modeled as a hapless passive recipient of "calories" with no
feedback loop will someday be seen right up there with pholostigon theory,
except less excusable. Any time you speak of a bodily process and aren't
thinking about the feedback loops, you've bounded your best-case outcome to
"utter failure" before taking the first step.)

~~~
merpnderp
This x10. I lost 43 lbs in 6 months upping my calorie intake by 500-1000
calories a day. But I drastically changed what types of calories I ate. I also
halved my triglycerides, and brought my HDL and LDL levels far into the
healthy ranges.

All by cutting out grains and sugar and replacing them with lots and lots of
vegetables and meat (I'm lying, it was mostly bacon).

~~~
logfromblammo
To a person who vehemently believes in the thermodynamic weight loss
hypothesis (calories in minus calories out!), it would be more convenient if
your anecdote, and others like it, did not exist.

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norea-armozel
I still don't see this as an argument against calorie counting. When I over
eat I know that I'm getting more calories than I need. It doesn't matter if
the stem of the plant I eat is harder or easier to digest when the average
calories consumed is higher than the average calories needed to lose or
maintain weight. I really wish people would just admit as much and not fight
in the margins for a completely wrong theory.

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iopq
> Proteins may require as much as five times more energy to digest as fats
> because our enzymes must unravel the tightly wound strings of amino acids
> from which proteins are built. Yet food labels do not account for this
> expenditure.

That's not quite true. Protein has 5 calories per gram, but labels only count
4 because of this fact.

~~~
wdewind
> That's not quite true. Protein has 5 calories per gram, but labels only
> count 4 because of this fact.

Can you give me more information about this? I've always wondered whether or
not calories listed are "net" calories (as in the number of calories you get
after you extract calories from the food) or "total" (as in this amount minus
the amount it takes to extract these calories). I'm just not sure what to
google to read more :)

~~~
iopq
I found a Wikipedia article with the actual amounts from combustion:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atwater_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atwater_system)

~~~
wdewind
Cool, I'll take a look, thanks

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bsenftner
Isn't this sorta obvious? I always assumed the calorie counts in foods were
old data, calculated a century ago, and the foods labeled with those counts
have been so modified since then that they are little more than relative
guesses useful for moderate comparison only. Add in the variances of how
different people digest, as well as how food combining impacts digestion, and
those counts are marginally useful at best. "Calorie" in foods have little to
nothing to do with "calorie" in chemistry and physics, other than they were
originally intended to be the same, but any thinking individual directing
attention to them sees they are not.

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johnnyboy32
I truly believe that calorie counting is just a big waste of time. sure you
can pin point all the macros your eating, but unless your training for a
competition or are a pro bodybuilder, than I believe just eating healthy and
eating a lot each day would help you gain muscle. some good information on
proper dieting is on this website I recently check out called
[http://bodyweightburnreviews.com/](http://bodyweightburnreviews.com/) See for
yourself If your interested...

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matthewrhoden1
Despite the fights breaking out over accuracy I still found this article
insightful. Eating 170 calories worth of broccoli vs 170 calories of honey
does have a strong difference. I'm sure you can still loose weight by counting
calories and adding a little exercise, even if you're adding honey to your
diet. But this article at least explains why you will progress better by
eating stuff that is a lot less processed.

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coldcode
I heard some of this already 30 years ago when I took classes in Nutritional
Chemistry. It's a highly complex system which is hard to measure and often
highly dependent on the individual. Today we know more about the gut organisms
which helps explain some of the variability, but like the brain much of what
we think we know is still speculation and often anecdotal.

Plus the yuck factor makes experimentation not much fun.

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talideon
Of course, you have to keep in mind the form those calories are coming in.
Fats, though energy dense, are pretty much slow release. Fructose, on the
other hand, is just nasty stuff that leads to a build-up of visceral fat. Both
of them contribute to your calorie count, but they both affect your body in
very different ways.

~~~
TurboHaskal
Dietary fat contributes to visceral fat as well, and at a greater degree than
fructose. There's always some energy lost during DNL.

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noobie
I recommend watching That Sugar Film[0], It addresses this in part because as
it turns out fat calories != sugar calories.

0.[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3892434/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3892434/)

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MikeTLive
How does the "eat less is simple" crowd rectify with the information seen in
this same space that gut flora can be the true difference between obesity and
airbrush candidacy?

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Mithaldu
This article is, in summary, a guy going "Well, actually, ..." about a tiny,
but irrelevant detail.

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callesgg
For some time now i have wondered what happens if one only eats corn for a
week.

~~~
magic_beans
Corn has to be pretty processed before it becomes edible -- cornmeal, corn
mash, corn mush, corn cakes, corn flour -- all of these are highly processed
versions of corn. But simply grilling corn on the cob? You'll see where most
of your calories are going when you flush!

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tpeo
This article takes up a common position that calories are " _wrong_ " because,
due to our bodies' complex natures, such an arbitrary measure ignores a lot of
what is going on. And yet, every time this view is expounded, someone comes up
to calories' defense, saying that they are a reliable measure of nutritional
energy. _So which one is right?_

While it is true that calories don't measure the nutritional energy absorbed
in any single meal, that would be a trivial proposition. Calories are a
_statistic_ , that is, an estimate of an unknown but posited number, and
partial representation of an underlying distribution. Saying that calories are
"wrong" in this sense would be merely stating that they are _possibly_ wrong.
And they would be wrong, if the underlying processes are somehow consistently
correlated with each other, which would produce inconsistent and biased
estimates of caloric content.

Yet, I don't have any reason to believe that the probability that I buy some
potato cultivar today is correlated with the composition of my gut flora three
weeks in the future, much less that it would be consistently so. On the
contrary, the factors supposedly affecting my nutrition according to
biologists are so many, and so diverse, that I might as well appeal to the
central limit theorem, in which case calories would be just as a good measure
as we can have. If today some potato gives me 166 kcal, and tomorrow 158, and
further on 163... I don't see what's the issue. The likelihood of a critical
event, such as starvation, due to misreporting of calories or due to some
feature of my constitution seems so low that I would only very likely trigger
it if I ate nothing but one type of food, in the same quantities, for a long
period of time.

Furthermore I will never understand those who prefer no measures to at least
one rough measure. No things are created perfect, but only made better. I
wonder would have happened it occurred to Eratosthenes that his measure would
have been too rough, too imprecise, or too vague for his mind. If all ancient
mathematicians were bothered that no "real" triangles were to be found
anywhere, mathematics wouldn't have happened at all. By such strict
understanding of measure and precision, of course measures fail. They couldn't
possibly live up to it. An other example is personality theory, which is said
to have been nearly abandoned at it's inception because some psychologists
thought of it entirely in terms of archetypes, rather than a general
description of probable behavior.

And lastly, if calories have been adequately defended here, then I'll also add
that ogling at them in order to find what is wrong with nutrition theory seems
completely wrong. We already know about calories, and they are a measure of
what we know. Rather than looking at them, we should be looking at the measure
of our ignorance, which is the error term. If some calories consistently fail
to account for some observations, then it's because no one has looked inside
the black box enough to figure out what is going on.

In short, it's a sensational headline. The only people who perhaps should be
worrying if calories are "wrong" in the sense of not being accurate to the
tenth decimal are Soylent-ers.

