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Comment by WorldMaker | Hacker News Reader

This was a problem well before the "Food Pyramid": Food Calories and the Standard Calorie Model were invented by the "scientists" at the Sanitarium at Battle Creek (aka "Wellville") who were also "coincidentally" the founders of Kellogg's and the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) based on some weird religious beliefs that grains were God's true foods. Food Calories were invented to sell more cereals, crackers, and cookies.

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Bit of a side note on grains being "God's true food" - I read a book about the formation of the earliest states (Against the Grain by James C. Scott) where the author argues basically that grains prevailed as states developed because of their suitability as a currency for taxation compared to other staples like potatoes/root vegetables. Grains are usually harvested all at once at predictable times (so harder to lie to tax collectors), have a relatively long shelf life, and are easy to weigh/standardize. I believe they're also more laborious to grow which might benefit a fledgling state trying to maintain control over its subjects.

The author has a noted anarchist bent, but definitely an interesting read and that take is kind of a funny parallel with the "God's true food" rhetoric.

Calorie is a unit of energy equivalent to the heat energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C (now often defined as equal to 4.1868 joules).

How was that invented to sell oreos?

That's the definition of "little-c" calorie, not food Calorie. Food Calorie still claims a relationship to "little-c" calorie but its scale is in a further different magnitude and some of the numbers in its standard model can't be replicated so are just taken as given constants. But also the SI system dropped little-c calorie for Joules in part to shake up the over-reliance in some of the sciences of old bad Phlogiston theories, that "heat energy" is somehow usefully more indicative of energy density. (The physics formula for energy density of mass is the well known E=mc^2, nothing to do with heat.)

Over-focusing on "heat energy" and a model that assumes the human body is an ideal spherical furnace ignores most, if not all, nuance in macronutrients and metabolism pathways, and biases in favor of foods that aren't as easy to set on fire (such as grains over fats). (Not to mention the very dark flipside of "exercise calories" and that if you are optimizing the human body's output as an ideal spherical furnace you are optimizing for states such as "fever" and "stroke".)

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