Throw out your calorie counter. Ignore the calorie count on food labels. Counting calories is a simple-minded and useless way to judge what you eat. Why? First off, a calorie is a unit of heat. Heat is not directly useful metabolically. Once a calorie is released, there is no putting it back.
Scientists have a very specific definition of a calorie. The simplest one is that a calorie is the amount of heat that is required to raise a cubic centimeter (milliliter) of water one degree Celsius, at room temperature and at sea level. Saying that you can consume calories is like saying that you can eat heat.
Health professionals, trainers, nutritionists, and many other experts who ought to know better, wrongly equate food calories to metabolism. This is based on simple-minded reasoning that says calories from food provide you with energy. This is incorrect!
Since you now know that calories are merely heat, you can understand why the only thing they do is effect temperature. The help with maintaining body temperature, not directly with metabolism.
Do you know how we measure calories in food? We incinerate the food in an instrument called a bomb calorimeter. When a substance is completely combusted, until nothing but the charred remains are left, it has released all of the calories that it contained. A bomb calorimeter measures how much heat is released upon complete combustion, which is expressed in calories.
The total heat that can be released from food in a bomb calorimeter is well-known for the three main food groups: 4 calories per gram of carbohydrate or protein and 9 calories per gram of fat. However, these numbers reflect only the maximum caloric yield in a bomb calorimeter. This number has nothing to do with what your body gets from food. This is why the maximum caloric potential of foods is, indeed, a nearly useless criterion when it comes to weight loss.
If your body was really like a furnace, then the calorie count of foods, such as on nutrition labels and in food lists, would have more meaning. Your body, however, has nothing to do with how a furnace works.
You can never, ever get all the energy out of food. At the most you might get 10 to 20 percent of the potential energy through your fuel-harvesting metabolism. You will certainly never get more than 30 percent. Sometimes you won't get any calories at all. Using a calorie counter tells you nothing about how your body will metabolize different types of food.
Consider this comparison: starch vs. cellulose. Cellulose is indigestible fiber, whereas starch is a source of food energy for humans. However, gram for gram, they both yield the same exact number of calories in a bomb calorimeter.
Likewise, a calorimeter will derive the same number of calories from equivalent amounts of celery and potato, after correcting for water content. Obviously, your body could not possibly do that.
Instead of comparing the metabolism of food to a furnace or calorimeter, it is much more meaningful to talk about what happens to different foods when they are digested, how they get into different kinds of cells (e.g., fat vs. muscle), and what happens to them once they are there.
A possibly surprising comparison for you is the difference between two nearly identical sugars, fructose and glucose. They yield the same number of calories per gram. However, glucose passes through the liver intact and serves a metabolic energy for many kinds of tissues, most notably muscle and liver. In contrast, fructose never escapes intact from the liver. This is why counting calories for even nearly identical foods is so useless.
The consequences of these differences are that glucose serves the metabolism of your entire body, whereas fructose has to be converted to something else before you can do anything with it. That something else is largely fat. In simpler terms, fructose will make you fat much faster than glucose will. Their caloric potential is irrelevant.
By the way, once you understand what is truly important about foods of all kinds, which is clearly not their calorie content, you will be very clear on why calories have nothing to do with being overweight. Chew on that comment for a while (pardon the pun), because this is the kind of clear thinking that will guide you to success in any weight loss or fitness program that works for a lifetime.
Scientists have a very specific definition of a calorie. The simplest one is that a calorie is the amount of heat that is required to raise a cubic centimeter (milliliter) of water one degree Celsius, at room temperature and at sea level. Saying that you can consume calories is like saying that you can eat heat.
Health professionals, trainers, nutritionists, and many other experts who ought to know better, wrongly equate food calories to metabolism. This is based on simple-minded reasoning that says calories from food provide you with energy. This is incorrect!
Since you now know that calories are merely heat, you can understand why the only thing they do is effect temperature. The help with maintaining body temperature, not directly with metabolism.
Do you know how we measure calories in food? We incinerate the food in an instrument called a bomb calorimeter. When a substance is completely combusted, until nothing but the charred remains are left, it has released all of the calories that it contained. A bomb calorimeter measures how much heat is released upon complete combustion, which is expressed in calories.
The total heat that can be released from food in a bomb calorimeter is well-known for the three main food groups: 4 calories per gram of carbohydrate or protein and 9 calories per gram of fat. However, these numbers reflect only the maximum caloric yield in a bomb calorimeter. This number has nothing to do with what your body gets from food. This is why the maximum caloric potential of foods is, indeed, a nearly useless criterion when it comes to weight loss.
If your body was really like a furnace, then the calorie count of foods, such as on nutrition labels and in food lists, would have more meaning. Your body, however, has nothing to do with how a furnace works.
You can never, ever get all the energy out of food. At the most you might get 10 to 20 percent of the potential energy through your fuel-harvesting metabolism. You will certainly never get more than 30 percent. Sometimes you won't get any calories at all. Using a calorie counter tells you nothing about how your body will metabolize different types of food.
Consider this comparison: starch vs. cellulose. Cellulose is indigestible fiber, whereas starch is a source of food energy for humans. However, gram for gram, they both yield the same exact number of calories in a bomb calorimeter.
Likewise, a calorimeter will derive the same number of calories from equivalent amounts of celery and potato, after correcting for water content. Obviously, your body could not possibly do that.
Instead of comparing the metabolism of food to a furnace or calorimeter, it is much more meaningful to talk about what happens to different foods when they are digested, how they get into different kinds of cells (e.g., fat vs. muscle), and what happens to them once they are there.
A possibly surprising comparison for you is the difference between two nearly identical sugars, fructose and glucose. They yield the same number of calories per gram. However, glucose passes through the liver intact and serves a metabolic energy for many kinds of tissues, most notably muscle and liver. In contrast, fructose never escapes intact from the liver. This is why counting calories for even nearly identical foods is so useless.
The consequences of these differences are that glucose serves the metabolism of your entire body, whereas fructose has to be converted to something else before you can do anything with it. That something else is largely fat. In simpler terms, fructose will make you fat much faster than glucose will. Their caloric potential is irrelevant.
By the way, once you understand what is truly important about foods of all kinds, which is clearly not their calorie content, you will be very clear on why calories have nothing to do with being overweight. Chew on that comment for a while (pardon the pun), because this is the kind of clear thinking that will guide you to success in any weight loss or fitness program that works for a lifetime.
About the Author:
People who want to know how to lose belly fat can find excellent solutions online. The the best place to start is Dr. Dennis Clark's free belly fat book.
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