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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In addition to the measuring system being outdated, the amount of calories taken from a meal can vary from person to person.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.
In addition to the measuring system being outdated, the amount of calories taken from a meal can vary from person to person.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.
Especially overweight people actively deluding themsleves by claiming that BMI doesn't apply.
BMI is pretty useless for many people. Taking myself for example. I'm about 5'10 and weigh around 175-180lbs with body fat % somewhere in the low teens. I coach a wrestling team and I'm in reasonably good shape and stronger than average for my weight. If I were to cut to competition weight I would be 150-160 and I competed in college at 150 many years ago. Anything lower than that and I'd be well into unhealthy - certainly nothing sustainable. But according to BMI calculators I would have to get down to around 130lbs to be considered underweight. Last time I weighed that much I was cutting weight as a junior in high school and was under 6% body fat. You'd have to put me in a concentration camp or give me cancer to get me that low again. BMI calculators put me now at borderline overweight at my current weight and that description doesn't make sense. My waist size is the same as it has been since college and while I could shed about 5-10% of my body mass without ill effect that's hardly overweight. I'm not delusional about my weight - I actually have a better idea of my body composition than most people do. Basically BMI is too crude a measure to be much use for a large swath of the population. It does have some utility but it can be pretty misleading too.
This sort of story smacks of "Nutritionism" as explained in Michael Pollan's book 'In Defense Of Food'. Generally people do not need to know how many calories, carbs, nutrients, vitamins, etc. are in a piece of food unless you are a nutritionist, and most people aren't. How to eat healthy comes down to one simple rule:
Eat food(1) mostly plants(2) not too much(3).
(1) Food defined by things your great-grandmother would recognize as being food. Nothing overly processed. Food should spoil. If what you eat will not spoil you should not eat it. Things that are not food, but edible food-type substances: refined sugar (includes soda, twinkies, etc), refined flour (white bread, etc), refined oils of all kinds (peanut oil, sunflower oil, and *gasp* olive oil).
(2) 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.
(3) Don't eat too much of one thing. Don't overeat.
If you do this, you don't need to count calories or take vitamins or worry about your riboflavin intake. Just eat and be healthy.
-Matt
Exercises is fun and pleasant, but when it comes at the cost of not seeing kids at all that day which is reality of many crunch or full-time+ working guys, I guess they favor being present fathers over having fun with friends.
So why can't you exercise with your kids? There are different kinds of exercise. You only need the extreme variety if you're training for the Olympics or are a professional athlete. If playing with the kids is not your bottle of beer, you can do simple light calisthenics before and even after every meal. Just don't eat a horse or you might throw up. You can also try old-fashioned walking. If you work in a high-rise, use the fire exit for part of your journey to your office. If all else fails, do what bonobos love to do when they're not eating bananas.
How much exercise? What is the correct balance of food? What is the baseline and how do we adjust for age, height, climate, altitude and yes even ethnicity? These are the questions that should be addressed. One hugely effective thing that seems to be proven over and over again only to be immediately forgotten a month latter is that you need to time your meals with your circadian rhythm i.e. only eat at certain times of the day based op when you wake up and when you go to bed. These are the kinds of improvements on efficiency that the rest of us are looking for.
I would recommend reading the article. For once they actually linked to an in depth discussion of the topic and the author cites a lot of useful information. For inctance, there is wild variance in calories based on whether or not the food you eat is completely cooked. Large pieces of meat can be potentially hundreds of less usable calories if prepared rare instead of well done.
It is this evidence that the article uses to criticize the calorie because a calorie is a measure of the absolute value of energy in the food you eat not the measurement of what the usable amount of energy is. Furthermore the article delves into how those calorie measurements are taken, and cites several pieces of evidence that those calorie amounts are highly inaccurate.
The article also disuses the role that gut bacteria play in our digestion, citing an example where a mother had gut bacteria transplanted from here obese daughter and gained 40 lbs without any change to diet an exercise. Thus diet and exercise are not the only influences of what we gain and how much. The article is littered with such evidence.
It is not just as simple as the food pyramid which, btw has been a broken model since its inception. Protein is supposed to occupy the lowest rung not carbohydrates and this has been well understood for years. Any doctor should be able to tell you that.
In the end I do understand where you are coming from. After all I am someone that lost 60+ lbs just by counting calories, but there are a lot of things that I could verify within the article based on my experiences. Such as continued unexplained weight loss even when I seemingly exceeded the maximum calories per day that I should have been eating. The article is definitely worth your time to read and even if you disagree with the assertion that the calorie is a broken method of measurement there is still a lot of useful information present.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"