Why the Calorie Is Broken (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Nutrition is a subject for which everybody should understand the basics. Unfortunately, this is hard. Not only is there a ton of conflicting research about how to properly fuel your body, there's a multi-billion-dollar industry with financial incentive to muddy the waters. Further, one of the most basic concepts for how we evaluate food — the calorie — is incredibly imprecise. "Wilbur Atwater, a Department of Agriculture scientist, began by measuring the calories contained in more than 4,000 foods. Then he fed those foods to volunteers and collected their faeces, which he incinerated in a bomb calorimeter. After subtracting the energy measured in the faeces from that in the food, he arrived at the Atwater values, numbers that represent the available energy in each gram of protein, carbohydrate and fat. These century-old figures remain the basis for today's standards."

In addition to the measuring system being outdated, the amount of calories taken from a meal can vary from person to person. Differences in metabolism and digestive efficiency add sizable error bars. Then there are issues with serving sizes and preparation methods. Research is now underway to find a better measure of food intake than the calorie. One possibility for the future is mapping your internal chemistry and having it analyzed with a massive database to see what foods work best for you. Another may involve tweaking your gut microbiome to change how you extract energy from certain foods.

Comments

I guess it's easier...

[Anonymous Coward]

... to

"One possibility for the future is mapping your internal chemistry and having it analyzed with a massive database to see what foods work best for you. Another may involve tweaking your gut microbiome to change how you extract energy from certain foods." ...than it is to eat when you are hungry and stop when you aren't, while avoiding shit foods.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[stealth_finger]

Whatever happened to eating a balanced diet and getting exercise?

What I don't get is the people that eat 3 full meals a day, go to work and sit down all day then come home to sit down all evening and then wonder why they get fat.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever happened to eating a balanced diet and getting exercise?

What I don't get is the people that eat 3 full meals a day, go to work and sit down all day then come home to sit down all evening and then wonder why they get fat.

Well that is one question that the conventional research does not adequately address.

If someone is a diabetic, all of the numbers are skewed towards fat storage being a priority in general. If this were not the case, and you could validly shift all the blame onto the "people are overeaters and lazy " as a 100% valid and testable explanation of the problem, then you have been hiding under a rock in the US for about 40 years now and are not paying attention to any evidence.

Here are some things we know now that are not being acknowledged that is along this line of questioning and you can see results with today (and the calorie as a concept is only partly to blame, the proper question being "What sorts of calories are needed and what sorts of calories cause a problem?")

1- Since the 1950s, the poor conclusions of research by Ancel Keys was treated as gospel, and yet he cherry picked his evidence, that the best diet to prevent heart disease was a high carb , low fat diet. This failed to explain the Innuit people, the French and the Japanese, who eat high fat moderate protein diets and had anomalously low rates of heart disease and obesity despite eating high fat diets.

2- It is nearly impossible in the US to find foods that do not have carbohydrates added to them.

3- Mountains of research have shown that high carbohydrate diets lock down your stored fat such that you cannot access it even if you do enough exercise in a day that would kill an olympic athlete, it is not laziness that is the problem because if you run the numbers on how many calories you eat and how many you expend, on the normal american diet, you would have to kill yourself to lose the average of a fraction of a pound a day. Exercise, in general is not an effective method of weight loss, and your body will actively fight you on it if your macronutrients (how much fat, carbohydrate and protein) are skewed toward energy being derived from carbohydrates.

4- despite all the claptrap, there is no such thing as an "Essential Carbohydrate". This has been shown over and over..

So if you want to lose weight and you are the supposedly lazy office worker you talk of, perhaps you could:

1- limit carbohydrate intake to as low as possible.
2- get adequate protein in your diet (20% of daily calories or enough that you have .6 to 1 gram of protein for every pound of lean body weight, which every is closer for your activity level)
3- Consume saturated fat for energy and put this up to somewhere around 75% of daily caloric intake.. and of these fats have 1/2 of your fat intake from short chain fatty acids and about 46% from mono-unsaturated fatty acids which would be your olive oils etc and limit your poly-unsaturated fatty acids in a 50/50 mixture of omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids totaling your intake of poly-unsaturated fats to no more than 4% of total caloric intake per day.)

if you can do those 3 things correctly every day, you will lose body fat, even if you are eating over your magic number of essential calories. I have done it and I am a diabetic who many doctors just throw their hands up and say that this is a chronic problem I will never be able to fix (they being fat themselves) and then when I come back and give blood they have no idea how I am able to control my blood sugar so tightly , keep my cholesterol numbers so fantastic and lose fat without losing lean body mass and then their explanation turns to some vague mention of being "Genetically lucky". All the while all I am doing is Ignoring the bullshit bad science being pushed on us by Ancel Keys.

Oh and by the way, in summary the concept of a "Balanced Diet" is a snow leopard, there is 0 consensus on what a "balanced diet" is. Never has been, yet you hear

Re:I guess it's easier...

[pr0t0]

Most people claim that BMI is inaccurate because...it's inaccurate. Professional athletes whose bodies are the epitome of fitness perfection are rated obese by BMI. The BMI was designed to determine the overall fitness level of a large group of people, like a nation. It was never meant to be used as an index for an individual level of fitness. It's used because it's a simple number that most people can understand, but human physiology is complicated. Most people are not smart enough to deal with the level of complexity, all the variables, to make intelligent decisions.

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Rei]

The article is a confused mishmash of different topics.

1. They present nothing wrong with the basic method used by Atwater, despite calling it "outdated". Discrepancies like the issue with nuts having 20-30% fewer calories than thought isn't due to a flaw in the Atwater method, it's due to them not actually being tested - they were simply grouped together with legumes and the calories just estimated based on fat, carbohydrate and protein present in them. The solution has nothing to do with there being "something wrong with the calorie" - the solution is that they need to test better and get better data.

2. Individual differences are generally small, and the only potential for significant deviation from the norm is towards those who get unusually few calories, not unusually many. I don't have time to dig up the numbers yet again right now, but they're in the ballpark of the average person's digestive system consuming ~94% of the protein that they eat, 97% of the fats that they eat and 99% of the carbohydrates that they eat. So a person's digestive system could potentially be much less efficient than average in some regard - although that's not normal - but it can't be much more efficient than average. You can have some more relevant variation on the breakdown of fiber to SCFAs but that's only a very small portion of daily calories. This excuse that the article is pushing people towards of "my body is just a much more efficient digester than the average person, that's why I'm fat" is simply not realistic.

3. Like in #1, there can be a difference between cooked and uncooked food in terms of availability of various nutrients - but again, this is not a problem with the concept of calories, it means that labels need to be accurate in regards to the preparation method. And it has very little impact on meat, contrary to the article's emphasis; it's mainly a plant thing (see the example of the nuts above). The human body is exceedingly good at breaking down cell membranes (animal cells), but not so great at getting through cell walls (plant cells), and it has more effect on non-caloric nutrients (many types of vitamins and minerals) than caloric ones. A lot of the energy loss in cooked meat is simply a fraction of the meat destroyed or otherwise lost (such as grease) in the cooking process. A steak shrinks dramatically when you cook it because it's losing ~45% of its water and a ~30% of its fat in the cooking process. The same steak has fewer total calories cooked, but more calories per gram.

4. Of course how you prepare food has an effect on what sort of nutrients it has, but since when is this news? Broiled, fried, steamed, etc - your mind is immediately jumping to pictures of how healthy that preparation method is when you see those words, isn't it? When you eat meat do you leave the skin on or take it off? Do you cut off gristle? Do you not expect these things to change the ratio of fats and proteins in the meat? We all know that how you fix a meal is going to influence the final picture. You don't calorie count a prepared meal by looking up the raw ingredients, you look up the prepared meal as a whole.

5. Their conflating the issue of cooked rice with the above about "cooking freeing up calories" is totally off mark, and actually backwards. Many types of starches (not just rice - potatoes, for example) partially convert from digestible starch to indigestible starch after cooling for several hours after cooking. There could be a general point to be made about how people should be better informed about the many ways in which preparation can alter the number of calories (though we already are generally rather aware of this), but it's not that the concept of the "calorie" is broken.

6. Metabolic consumption has nothing to do with the calories present in food. And yes, there are variations in basal metabolic rate. But the standard deviation is only 5-8%. Variations in metabolism from exercise betwe

Re:I guess it's easier...

[Rhacman]

People *want* it to be more complex than that. People don't like the guidance they are given to be active, eat more vegetables and less simple sugars. Every time a study like this comes out they quiver in their seats at the thought that they've been absolved of personal responsibility for their health because the metric was wrong all along.

After all, if the medical community is so confused who can say if it is or isn't a good idea to tuck into another sleeve of Oreos? The definition of a calorie isn't perfect, so maybe drinking beer and watching TV actually counts as exercise?

Re: I guess it's easier...

[pnutjam]

Let's not pretend their aren't as many bad dietitians as bad doctors.

Not the Calories fault?

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA "Nash uses an app to record the calories he consumes and a Fitbit band to track the energy he expends."

Is it possible that the Calorie is just fine and maybe using some cheap piece of electronics strapped to your wrist is just a really piss poor way to track the energy expended?

The basics haven't changed

[petes_PoV]

If we're talking about obesity, then it's still a case of you only get fat if you eat too much. And here (for those who haven't already clicked Reply and are starting an argument) "too much" means more than your body needs to function, for however much or little exercise you take.

If your weight is increasing and you don't want it to: either exercise more to burn off the excess, or eat less. That is independent of whatever unit of energy you use - or the accuracy of the food labeling.

Re:The basics haven't changed

[omnichad]

Eat "less" is the part that's in question. how much less to eat depends entirely on what type of calorie you are eating (specific types of fat, protein, or carbohydrate). Cutting out the soda but not cutting out the ribeye steak might make a lot bigger difference than the converse, even if they are the same decrease in overall calories. And there are some arguments that decreasing carbohydrates and increasing fat intake and overall consuming more calories can still result in weight loss (or at least no additional gain), depending on individual biology.

Go to the dietician and ask him.

[havana9]

I was 85 kg in June, now I'm 69 kg. How I've lost weight? Fiers of all i've gone to my general practitioner and him made a me a request for a visit to a dietician at the hospital. I paid a ticket €40 fort the visit, the doctor visited me, printed a personalized diet after having asked me my food preferences, advise me to make some exercise everyday. I started to walk at work instead of using the car, making 4 km every day. I followed the diet at the letter (except xmas, of course).

Following the diet at the letter was meaning weigh as much I could all the food I was eating and estimate when I couldn't, say wen I was eating outside, and having one and only one meal per week where I eated a bit more, like pizza or sushi, but without overeating.

Of course some foods were banned, like carbonated dink with sugar or industrial snacks. The doctor said to me that if I wanted to eat say some chocolate, having to eat less was way better to eat the high quality one.

When last week I meet him for the control visit, he complimented me with the result and gave me the maintenance diet, that was similar to the one I was following for loss weight but with some more daily food to eat.

I think that self made diets or read on newspapers aren't going to work. Ask an expert..

US Gov Advice USED to be OK for the masses

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Remember the government's "four food groups" with X servings of 4 groups (meats, dairy, bread, fruits and vegetables)? (http://www.rootedcook.com/visuals/foodguides/ - 1956-1992) It worked (it was even used on game shows) because people could understand and remember four things and whole numbers without units.

Today's government food pyramid? It's 6 different items measured in a mix of "cups" and "ounces" (http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/05/82105-004-3C485EB5.jpg) - not exactly how food is packaged and remembering 6 different figures with units is beyond what people can easily recollect.

If you want the masses to "get" any nutritional advise, I can't see how blowing up a common denominator like the calorie would help.

Re:BMI is a poor tool

[Alioth]

Well, a small swath of the population. People with lots of muscle and little body fat are a very small minority of the population. For nearly everyone else, BMI is a perfectly good rule of thumb. For instance, looking around the room now I can see about 20 people, all of which if you calculated their BMI would give a perfectly good rough idea of where they fit.

Re:Nutritionism

[AmiMoJo]

Food defined by things your great-grandmother would recognize as being food.

Problem is my great-grandmother was a stay-at-home mother and had plenty of time to prepare meals. It was one of her primary responsibilities. I, on the other hand, have little time to find recipes, shop for ingredients, manage my stock and cook food from scratch.

Plants, meaning whole fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes. And a variety. Different shapes, textures, colors, whole and fresh if you can get it. This should make up 90% of your diet. Less than 10% of your diet should come from animal products. This includes dairy and meat.

In Japan fruit is quite expensive, for various reasons. They eat a lot of rice, a hell of a lot of meat, fish, seafood and seaweed. They also have very long life expectancy and are generally pretty healthy if they don't destroy themselves with alcohol or smoking. Obesity is only really much of an issue with the younger generation that has a slightly more western diet.

I find I can't finish most Japanese meals, the portions are too large. Japanese people do okay. I think it's because they are used to the amount of protean. Protean makes you feel full, and meat has plenty of it.