The calorie myth

Calories applied to nutrition are a myth to be debunked, with no scientific basis.

The caloric value of a substance is the amount of heat obtained from the complete combustion of one gram of that substance, and it is measured in calories.

The large calorie, or simply calorie (kcal), is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water by 1 degree Celsius ( from 14.5 °C to 15.5 °C).

The American chemist Wilbur Olin Atwater was the first to apply the concept of the calorie to nutrition. In his research, Atwater applied the first law of thermodynamics, which before him had already been used in studies of animal nutrition and metabolism but had not been applied to humans, because humans were thought to be naturally different and not subject to the same physical and chemical laws that hold in the animal world. Atwater determined that a certain percentage (less than 10%) of the food we eat is not digested, and therefore provides no calories. Of the remaining 90%, that is, the food that is digested, protein and carbohydrates produce on average about 4 kilocalories per gram, and fat 9 kcal/g. Alcohol is 7 kcal/g.

Rachel Carmody, a researcher at Harvard University, argues that the Atwater system needs a complete overhaul, since it is widely used to determine caloric values with a 140-year-old method that is recognized as invalid. As she explains in the Daily Mail: "The caloric values shown on food labels do not capture the significant costs of digestion, which are generally lower for processed foods and higher for unprocessed ones. So even though two foods may have the same number of calories on paper, those calories are not necessarily equally available to the body. In some cases, the reported caloric values may differ from the actual energy harvested by as much as 50%."

Professor Paolo Manzelli, a lecturer in physical chemistry and director of the Laboratory of Research and Innovative Education in Florence, states: "The human body is not a machine and the calorie cannot be applied to living beings. It is an error entrenched in industrial society, but in the shift toward knowledge, the energy-mechanical work equation is false. A living being is not a heat exchanger like a stove, because it dissipates heat. We should rather focus on the quality of food..."

As Dr. Veronica Pacella says: "The latest studies show that when the human body sees its food intake drop, it sets in motion mechanisms tied to the primal fear of starving to death. It then starts to reduce its energy use and slow down its basal metabolism, often drawing on "lean mass" for energy (that is, muscle) and not on fat as many people think.

The result is temporary weight loss, because as soon as you start eating "normally" again, the body, which still holds the "alarm" signal, tries to store as much food as it can in anticipation of a future famine, and so you go back to being overweight.

Being overweight has several causes and can result from a sedentary lifestyle, a slowed metabolism, hormonal dysfunctions and food intolerances. It is up to the specialist to identify the reason and get the body going again so that it responds best to nutritional stimuli, which do not necessarily correspond to the quantity of food and which should make use of the action that each food exerts in the body."

In short, calories, that is, the heat-producing capacity of food, have nothing to do with it.

The calorie measurement treats energy only as a fixed fact: an apple's label always shows the same calories, but that has nothing to do with what happens in the body. The fructose in the apple may be converted into glycogen and stored, or it may feed the gut bacteria, or, if glycogen stores are full, it will be converted into fat, and so on. These are all different biochemical processes, which use and produce different amounts of energy. By contrast, the same wood will give off the same heat in every fireplace.

A cherry tomato and a teaspoon of sugar: both have 20 calories but the body will treat them in completely different ways. Moreover, the tomato is rich in enzymes, vitamins and minerals, while sugar provides none of the enzymes, minerals and vitamins found in the cherry tomato, yet requires just as many of them to be processed. The body needs substances like vitamins, minerals and other molecules for its metabolism, and these substances go beyond the usual carbohydrates, protein and fat that we all know and find on labels next to the caloric values.

CONCLUSION

1. We are not ovens or stoves, which is how the caloric (thermal) value of carbohydrates, protein and fat was established;
2. Humans produce chemical energy from food, not thermal energy;
3. We use energy to metabolize a food, since we use energy to chew it, digest it, assimilate it and get rid of the toxins that food supplies, all factors left out of the calorie count;
4. The current system for calculating calories is based on tables that are at least 140 years old (1870);
5. The nutritional value written on the labels of a food with more than one ingredient is calculated simply by arithmetically adding up the calories of the various ingredients, without considering the energy that will be spent digesting the food;
6. The person who established how much of the energy from ingested calories the human body uses (Wilbur Olin Atwater) estimated the energy from the remains found in feces;
7. The same food can be metabolized in different ways, producing and using different amounts of energy, so the fixed concept of the calorie is absurd;
8. Carbohydrates, protein and fat are not all the same: those in some foods are more bioavailable than others, and their biochemistry depends on the foods eaten earlier, on those that accompany them, and on the time of day;
9. Our hormonal condition, our mood, the condition of the intestine, stomach, liver and pancreas, our mental state, physical activity and the environment we live in are all factors that determine how we metabolize, how much energy we use, how much we store and how much we produce.