The Calorie delusion: why food labels are wrong | Hacker News Reader

The Calorie delusion: why food labels are wrong

newscientist.com

37 pointsseldo27 comments

This is a horrible, horrible title. The author states that counting calories is "broadly correct", but that food labels show inaccurate calorie counts, and miss some other factors.

The problem with a title like this is that it's easy for people who are ignorant to just read the headline, and get the wrong idea.

I know obese people who think that chocolate can't make them fat because it's "low-fat" chocolate. I know of other people who say "I've tried everything, but I can't lose wait", who still drink a lot of sugary pop every day.

Broadly speaking (haha!), you get fat when you take in too much energy, and don't expend enough.

I don't think the title is incorrect. He makes the point that even a 10 calorie imbalance per day add up to 1kg of fat in a year, so these small differences are important if you really try to tune your diet to exactly match some calorie count.

Food labels are still incredibly valuable - they have been for me at least since taking a real nutrition class.

For one thing, if you're calculating calories to that sort of margin, you're doing it wrong, and are more likely to get yourself into an eating disorder than anything.

Labels help you avoid high-fat and high-sodium foods, and steer you towards high-fiber choices. Above anything these three factors are the most important in your diet. I've tried the calorie-restricting diets, I've read about Atkins where you can glutton yourself on greasy meat patties all day... none of those things work.

Even if you eat moderately, if what you're eating is crap, you will not get the results you want. 500 calories in the form of a Big Mac is not the same as 500 calories of balanced vegetables, fiber, and meat.

I find the primary problem with average diet is too little fruit. when you increase fruit intake the craving for processed high sugar high fat foods diminishes significantly.

I consider myself lucky then, I've never been a big fan of fruit, nor high-sugar foods. Sure I get the occasional craving for a cookie or something, but I never binge on sugar.

"So if food labels are giving consumers a potentially misleading picture of their dietary choices, what should be done about it?

For many nutritionists, the answer is nothing." (the following phrases say revamping the system is too expensive)

We have enough money to study all sorts of disease and weapons and phenomena, but we can't afford to fix an issue that impacts most people's everyday lives? Yay.

Calories are an incomplete way of looking at food anyway. What type of food are you eating? What sort of enzymes does your body need to produce to digest it? What sort of hormones will be produced?

From a fitness perspective food is a game of hormone manipulation, not calorie counting.

the problem is the lumping of calorie without saying which originates from meat, veg and fruit

in china study page 74, chart 4.3, a standardized body-weight 65 kg (143 lbs) is used. it takes 2641 kcal/day for chinese person to weigh 65 kg while it takes 1989 kcal/day for united states person. it indicates that calorie counting is flawed. i won't say why, you just need to draw your own conclusion based on this link:

http://books.google.com/books?id=FIRLLcLjyC8C&pg=PA74...

i guess history repeats herself (google mcgovern), it's politically easier to blame everything on abstract thing (like fat, calorie, etc) than on specific thing (like milk, meat, etc)

I think the problem is the exact opposite. It's easier to blame everything on some single, specific thing like high fructose syrup or saturated fat.

If you eat varied and in moderation (and don't sit on the couch all day) then you wont be obese. But politically it's better to blame McD, Coca Cola, and friends than say "You're fat, and it's your own fault".

> it takes 2641 kcal/day for chinese person to weigh 65 kg while it takes 1989 kcal/day for united states person.

There's no magic going on here:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cars%20per%20capita...

Part of the article discusses how soft, highly processed, or cooked foods are easier to digest and thus yield more usable calories than hard, unprocessed, or uncooked foods. The implicit conclusion is that the hard foods should be preferred due to the decreased caloric usage.

However, there is a flip-side to it: Having to digest a big, tough-to-process meal can actually cause you to feel tired! By eating soft easy-to-digest food, you leave more of your body's precious energy available for things like, you know, going about your daily activities. (Read _Spent_ by Frank Lipman for more on the topic.)

With that in mind, though, it's still probably better to eat soft easy-to-digest nutritious foods than the all-too-common easy-to-digest processed crap that's devoid of any nutritional value.

Read Gary Taubes' book "Good Calories, Bad Calories".

I remember thinking "This is pretty stupid" when doing that peanut burning experiment in class. Glad that I was on to something for a change.

Same thing. In the 7th grade, I was incredulous when they said that food calories were calculated by burning food and seeing how much it heats up water. Absolutely ridiculous. Simple proof: Kerosene is jack-full of calories.

"Simple proof: Kerosene is jack-full of calories."

Err... it is. What's your point? Caloric content is completely unrelated to toxicity, and I don't see any reason why it should be.

What's your point

God, I hate explaining obvious things. Are you really that confused? Really? Which has more energy that can be metabolized by a human being:

1) One celery stalk, or

2) 500,000 gallons of jet fuel.

Huh? Huh? The nutrition labels are not talking about the physical sciences but human nutrition.

A Calorie is the energy needed to heat 1 kg of water by 1 degree.

Given that the human body is mostly water, and produces lots of heat, a calorie is a perfect way to measure the energy content of food.

Perfect, if you are powering specific lab engines. Not perfect if you are powering an animal. Can someone explain to me where the confusion is here?

To explain further, since further explanation is obviously needed: There is the physical calorie, which is ONE THING, and then there is the vernacular, "nutritional" calorie", which is something ordinary people deal with day-by-day. They are VERY different, in that kerosene calories and celery calories are handled differently by the human body.

Again, very simple until it comes up against people who don't interact often with reality.

1) There is no confusion -- the physical and nutritional calorie are the same thing (EXCEPT that the nutritional calorie is usually the kilocalorie, or Calorie with a capital c, while the physical calorie is the plain old calorie). You have to remember that the calorie is an abstract unit.

The human body is a gigantic chemical engine, but it operates in a different way from a (jet/propulsive) engine. It's like the difference between LiOn and NiCad batteries. You measure them both in volts or wattage output or hours, but they operate in fundamentally different ways -- you can't use the same chemical mixtures, even though those mixtures have the same potential energy as measured by some abstract unit.

It's not full calories that can be metabolized by the human body, though, that's the point.

I've always had the same question regarding alcohol. Alcohol has a lot of calories, but I've never been able to conclusively figure out whether those calories are actually metabolizable. It seems to me that since alcohol is broken down by the liver, it should be a net drain on calories.

Previously submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=707044

and not very hackerish

A while back I suggested swapping two letters in calorie to define a new measure: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/06/colarie-new-way-of-measure-c...

I am beginning to feel the same way about people using non-SI units as I do about people using non-standards-compliant browsers and non-unicode character encodings.

Calorie? What the hell is a calorie? I always have to look it up. Oh, it's 4.2J. Except when it's 4.2KJ. So one KCal could be 4.2KJ or maybe 4.2MJ. The article is using the small calories. Other comments here are using large ones. Man, I love it when there's a 3-order-of-magnitude context-dependent variation in the base unit of measurement!

See this? Look at the date:

http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/009/ae906e/ae906e17.htm

1971. I wasn't even born. I should have never even learned the damn word. Oh but no, people have to have their "customs". Well, customs are the enemy of progress!

Why is this article using Calories at all? They are deprecated and have been for almost 40 years. I know many Americans derive a perverse enjoyment persisting against all logic in their use of obsolete and inefficient forms of measurement, on the sole and often mistaken grounds that they are somehow more "American", but the Calorie is French anyway.

There's the real "Calorie Delusion"! The delusion is that there's even such a thing as Calories. Joules, baby. It's all about the Joules.

Why do you have to look up what a calorie is? 25% of something works the same way regardless of units. The words more and less retain their meaning regardless of units. The article could have used playstation3-hours and nothing would change.

Except that the energy need of a human is not 2500 ps3-hours/day, it's 2500 kcal per day. The article does actually use absolute numbers in quite a few places, and there the units do matter.

Yay, a fellow SI nazi! :)

I remember being helplessly confused when I moved to the US before I figured out that what the Americans call a "calorie" is actually a kcal. A cal is the scientific unit, normally used with the k prefix, and in Sweden food labels (and even our school home economics textbook) use kcal (and KJ).

I'm kind of used to the US using weird-ass units by now, but the fact that they just decided to drop the prefix on some unit (presumably because they didn't want to subject the public to learning that k means thousands) is too much.

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