

The Calorie delusion: why food labels are wrong - seldo
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327171.200-the-calorie-delusion-why-food-labels-are-wrong.html

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JabavuAdams
This is a horrible, horrible title. The author states that counting calories
is "broadly correct", but that food labels show inaccurate calorie counts, and
miss some other factors.

The problem with a title like this is that it's easy for people who are
ignorant to just read the headline, and get the wrong idea.

I know obese people who think that chocolate can't make them fat because it's
"low-fat" chocolate. I know of other people who say "I've tried everything,
but I can't lose wait", who still drink a lot of sugary pop every day.

Broadly speaking (haha!), you get fat when you take in too much energy, and
don't expend enough.

~~~
lutorm
I don't think the title is incorrect. He makes the point that even a 10
calorie imbalance per day add up to 1kg of fat in a year, so these small
differences are important if you really try to tune your diet to exactly match
some calorie count.

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potatolicious
Food labels are still incredibly valuable - they have been for me at least
since taking a real nutrition class.

For one thing, if you're calculating calories to that sort of margin, you're
doing it wrong, and are more likely to get yourself into an eating disorder
than anything.

Labels help you avoid high-fat and high-sodium foods, and steer you towards
high-fiber choices. Above anything these three factors are the most important
in your diet. I've tried the calorie-restricting diets, I've read about Atkins
where you can glutton yourself on greasy meat patties all day... none of those
things work.

Even if you eat moderately, if what you're eating is crap, you will not get
the results you want. 500 calories in the form of a Big Mac is not the same as
500 calories of balanced vegetables, fiber, and meat.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
I find the primary problem with average diet is too little fruit. when you
increase fruit intake the craving for processed high sugar high fat foods
diminishes significantly.

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potatolicious
I consider myself lucky then, I've never been a big fan of fruit, nor high-
sugar foods. Sure I get the occasional craving for a cookie or something, but
I never binge on sugar.

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costan
"So if food labels are giving consumers a potentially misleading picture of
their dietary choices, what should be done about it?

For many nutritionists, the answer is nothing." (the following phrases say
revamping the system is too expensive)

We have enough money to study all sorts of disease and weapons and phenomena,
but we can't afford to fix an issue that impacts most people's everyday lives?
Yay.

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matthew-wegner
Calories are an incomplete way of looking at food anyway. What type of food
are you eating? What sort of enzymes does your body need to produce to digest
it? What sort of hormones will be produced?

From a fitness perspective food is a game of hormone manipulation, not calorie
counting.

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hs
the problem is the lumping of calorie without saying which originates from
meat, veg and fruit

in china study page 74, chart 4.3, a standardized body-weight 65 kg (143 lbs)
is used. it takes 2641 kcal/day for chinese person to weigh 65 kg while it
takes 1989 kcal/day for united states person. it indicates that calorie
counting is flawed. i won't say why, you just need to draw your own conclusion
based on this link:

[http://books.google.com/books?id=FIRLLcLjyC8C&pg=PA74...](http://books.google.com/books?id=FIRLLcLjyC8C&pg=PA74&lpg=PA74&dq=china+study+chart+4.3&source=bl&ots=h8Zyb-
hbjs&sig=v3SRBE4R80jJYtx3d2X43f4fxw8&hl=en&ei=4IdhSp6aGseBkQWe1bDwDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1)

i guess history repeats herself (google mcgovern), it's politically easier to
blame everything on abstract thing (like fat, calorie, etc) than on specific
thing (like milk, meat, etc)

~~~
hassing
I think the problem is the exact opposite. It's easier to blame everything on
some single, specific thing like high fructose syrup or saturated fat.

If you eat varied and in moderation (and don't sit on the couch all day) then
you wont be obese. But politically it's better to blame McD, Coca Cola, and
friends than say "You're fat, and it's your own fault".

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witten
Part of the article discusses how soft, highly processed, or cooked foods are
easier to digest and thus yield more usable calories than hard, unprocessed,
or uncooked foods. The implicit conclusion is that the hard foods should be
preferred due to the decreased caloric usage.

However, there is a flip-side to it: Having to digest a big, tough-to-process
meal can actually cause you to feel tired! By eating soft easy-to-digest food,
you leave more of your body's precious energy available for things like, you
know, going about your daily activities. (Read _Spent_ by Frank Lipman for
more on the topic.)

With that in mind, though, it's still probably better to eat soft easy-to-
digest nutritious foods than the all-too-common easy-to-digest processed crap
that's devoid of any nutritional value.

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dmfdmf
Read Gary Taubes' book "Good Calories, Bad Calories".

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naz
I remember thinking "This is pretty stupid" when doing that peanut burning
experiment in class. Glad that I was on to something for a change.

~~~
mynameishere
Same thing. In the 7th grade, I was incredulous when they said that food
calories were calculated by burning food and seeing how much it heats up
water. Absolutely ridiculous. Simple proof: Kerosene is jack-full of calories.

~~~
jerf
"Simple proof: Kerosene is jack-full of calories."

Err... it is. What's your point? Caloric content is completely unrelated to
toxicity, and I don't see any reason why it should be.

~~~
fatdog789
A Calorie is the energy needed to heat 1 kg of water by 1 degree.

Given that the human body is mostly water, and produces lots of heat, a
calorie is a perfect way to measure the energy content of food.

~~~
mynameishere
Perfect, if you are powering specific lab engines. Not perfect if you are
powering an animal. Can someone explain to me where the confusion is here?

To explain further, since further explanation is obviously needed: There is
the physical calorie, which is _ONE THING_ , and then there is the vernacular,
"nutritional" calorie", which is something ordinary people deal with day-by-
day. They are VERY different, in that kerosene calories and celery calories
are handled differently by the human body.

Again, very simple until it comes up against people who don't interact often
with reality.

~~~
fatdog789
1) There is no confusion -- the physical and nutritional calorie are the same
thing (EXCEPT that the nutritional calorie is usually the kilocalorie, or
Calorie with a capital c, while the physical calorie is the plain old
calorie). You have to remember that the calorie is an _abstract_ unit.

The human body is a gigantic chemical engine, but it operates in a different
way from a (jet/propulsive) engine. It's like the difference between LiOn and
NiCad batteries. You measure them both in volts or wattage output or hours,
but they operate in fundamentally different ways -- you can't use the same
chemical mixtures, even though those mixtures have the same potential energy
as measured by some abstract unit.

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tokenadult
Previously submitted:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=707044>

~~~
tybris
and not very hackerish

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jgrahamc
A while back I suggested swapping two letters in calorie to define a new
measure: [http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/06/colarie-new-way-of-
measure-c...](http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/06/colarie-new-way-of-measure-
calorie.html)

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sailormoon
I am beginning to feel the same way about people using non-SI units as I do
about people using non-standards-compliant browsers and non-unicode character
encodings.

Calorie? What the hell is a calorie? I always have to look it up. Oh, it's
4.2J. Except when it's 4.2KJ. So one KCal could be 4.2KJ or maybe 4.2MJ. The
article is using the small calories. Other comments here are using large ones.
Man, I love it when there's a 3-order-of-magnitude context-dependent variation
in the base unit of measurement!

See this? Look at the date:

<http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/009/ae906e/ae906e17.htm>

1971\. I wasn't even born. I should have never even learned the damn word. Oh
but no, people have to have their "customs". Well, customs are the enemy of
progress!

Why is this article using Calories at all? They are deprecated and have been
for almost 40 years. I know many Americans derive a perverse enjoyment
persisting against all logic in their use of obsolete and inefficient forms of
measurement, on the sole and often mistaken grounds that they are somehow more
"American", but the Calorie is French anyway.

There's the real "Calorie Delusion"! The delusion is that there's even such a
thing as Calories. Joules, baby. It's all about the Joules.

~~~
tedunangst
Why do you have to look up what a calorie is? 25% of something works the same
way regardless of units. The words more and less retain their meaning
regardless of units. The article could have used playstation3-hours and
nothing would change.

~~~
lutorm
Except that the energy need of a human is not 2500 ps3-hours/day, it's 2500
kcal per day. The article does actually use absolute numbers in quite a few
places, and there the units _do_ matter.

