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Why the Calorie Is Broken (arstechnica.com)
New submitter ami.one writes: Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley explain how we are still using a century old method for measuring the calories in our food and the calories spent in different human activities. Essentially, there is a very big difference between burning stuff in a bomb calorie-meter and the extremely complex ways our body extracts energy from food. In fact, the exact process of digestion is yet to be understood sufficiently at a micro level, and years from being replicated to any close degree. Plus, the way our bodies spend calories for a given activity is hugely different from the way a car consumer gasoline and dependent on a number of parameters — some of which are not even known currently. Therefore, balancing calories in to Calories out is not so stupidly simple as it seems to the underweight layperson . Update: 01/28 22:09 GMT by T : Sorry for the duplicate post; it was a long night.
But we know why. Useless staff.
Then again, dupes of stupid stories have been with Slashdot since the beginning. It kind of makes you wonder what (if anything) the so-called "editors" of this site do other than take kickbacks from the likes of Hassleton and that d-bag over at Forbes.
Then again, there's an important social policy angle to the Slashdot editing "quality": It's a powerful argument that they should be paid less than minimum wage.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
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In addition to the measuring system being outdated, the amount of calories taken from a meal can vary from person to person.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.
Oh and my captcha is pinhead which obviously refers to the editors.
That is it. Dupe!
BlameBillCosby.com
This story was on the front-page yesterday, do you guys not even TRY to keep track of this shit?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If you're going to complain about misunderstandings among laypeople, let's start with the proper name for the unit used pretty much everywhere: you're talking about kilocalories when you talk to a layperson in the US about the "calorie".
Second, even if in a typical case we could perfectly balance energy intake to activities, it's been shown that many bodies are atypical. We are not feeding spherical cows of uniform density in a vacuum. These are people with more or less muscle mass, different things going on in their endocrine systems, different overall body mass, different drug intakes, different vitamin and protein levels and sources, and different genetics.
The real-world test for a dietary plan is whether it helps you maintain your health and desired weight. There is enough research to recommend some alternatives as definitely better than others, but there's been no definitive perfect diet. Ultimately the perfect diet is one that allows you to be both healthy and satisfied, and that it can't do on its own. The dietary plan can contribute, but it also takes other lifestyle factors.
Therefore, balancing calories in to Calories out is not so stupidly simple as it seems to the underweight layperson.
What about the previously slightly obese person and currently healthy weight person (by BMI measurement)? Because that's me. And even during the obese period, I never had any delusions about it not being as simple as balancing calories in and out. It was a matter of changing my mindset so that I was actually serious about the work involved.
Are they right that the number of calories you take in isn't exact? Of course. It's even harder to measure the number of calories out. Does this matter? Not in the least. They're good enough rough approximations. If you're trying to match your calories in to your calories out to a net -5 calories, you're doing it wrong. Aim for at least -500. Even if you're wrong by, say, 400 calories, you're still negative -100 and in the long term will lose weight. Sometimes you'll be wrong in the other direction and will be negative even more that 500 calories for that day. Chances are, in fact, that the long-term average will approximate what you're aiming for.
The unit of energy in the mtric system is the Joule
with the typical metric multipliers = 1 KWhr is 3.6 MegaJoules
And the sun is high!
What the hells goin on in the engine room? Were there monkeys? Some terrifying space monkeys maybe got loose?