Do you count calories? By the end of this post I hope you will never do so again. Not because it’s unhealthy or compulsive or whatever, but because calories are completely and utterly irrelevant to our bodies.
What’s a calorie?
A calorie when it is used in connection with food (because there are other uses too) is a unit of energy. It’s the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of one litre of water by one degree. How did chemists find out how many calories carbohydrates, for example, have? They burned them and watched how much you need to burn to raise the temperature of one litre of water by one degree.
They also burned fat and noticed that you need less fat than carbohydrates to get the same amount of energy. So fat has “more” energy. All this burning took place in a lab. This is where expressions like “burn fat/carbs” and “burn off energy” come from.
But our bodies don’t burn food
The two metabolisms in our bodies are the glucose and the fat metabolism. Neither of them “burn” anything. They are complex chemical processes, that break down food into smaller molecules. The molecules are then used in other chemical processes in our cells.
Some are needed to build new cells, like muscles. Others become a part of complicated bigger molecules, like enzymes and hormones. Most of the food molecules are used in chemical processes which release energy. But they are never burned.
What calories really say
What calories really mean is how much food you need to burn to raise the temperature of one litre of water by one degree. In a lab. They literally have nothing to do with how food is used and processed in our bodies.
Why do we still use them? Because they are everywhere, implying that calories are meaningful. They create the illusion of control because we are told that we can measure and quantify what we eat. Calories also allow others to trick us.
So called nutrition “facts” are on most food packaging. In some countries, they are even required by law. Fast food chains tell us exactly how many calories their food has. This is deliberately misleading because we believe that we can compare different kinds of food based on their caloric content.
Have you ever done the math and convinced yourself that instead of eating two bananas you could just have one chocolate bar? The calories are the same so it’s the same energy content, right? Yes, if you burn both in a lab underneath a pot of water.
Food is complex
In our bodies, however, food is used in various ways. How many carbs a meal contains is not as important as what those carbohydrate molecules actually look like. Highly processed carbohydrates make us sick, even if we eat less than the unprocessed kind.
Food also contains all kinds of combinations. Fruit sugar, for example, always comes with two types of fibre in unprocessed fruit, which allows our bodies to absorb the sugar slowly. Calories ignore these complexities. At best, they are utterly irrelevant, unless you want to heat up some water. At worst, they trick us into eating unhealthy food.
The Dodo Munches cannot and does not contain medical/health advice. The information is provided for general informational and educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice. Please read the full disclaimer here.