Whenever I mention diet, nutrition or healthy eating in conversation nowadays, it’s almost inevitable that I hear something about calories within the conversation. Especially over the Thanksgiving holiday! I guess it IS a holiday that revolves so heavily around food and feasting that the jabber about eating topics is pretty predictable.
But enough with the calories already!!
We’ve become WAY too focused on QUANTITY of food rather than QUALITY.
Calories have gotten all the fame, while nutrients fade into the background.
Is this the low calorie version of cookies and milk?? Who cares! This snack is void of nutrients!!
I can tell you with complete certainty that lack of food quality is a much bigger problem than our food quantity problems. AND I can assure you that our buddy ‘calories’ doesn’t deserve all the attention it’s been getting!
But instead of delving into my own explanation, I’ve provided you with a clear, clever, concise excerpt from leading Fat Loss expert in the UK, Dax Moy.
This stuff is brilliant, my friends. Enjoy…
“Read practically any article or book about fat loss or weight control and they’ll tell you that the problem is basically a mathematical one. That it’s about nothing more than eating too much or moving too little… or both.
Now, amongst most health and fitness professionals and practically everyone else, there’s an almost mindless, cult-like following of the calories-in, calories out theory.
The mantra ‘burn more than you eat, eat more than you burn’ has been marked indelibly on the minds of so many people (including those that should know much, much better) that this theory (and it IS a theory after all) has been elevated to the status of ‘fact’ without ever having had to have earned its rightful place as such.
The trouble is, the calories-in-calories-out model does nothing but reduce the entire human physiology and metabolism to a machine. It says that the body runs on a kind of ‘miles per gallon’ equation (like your car) without ever taking into account the complex nature of untold biochemical interactions that are occurring within your body every second of every day, each of which can and do affect the way in which your body extracts, uses, stores and disposes of the nutrients you consume.
And, you know, the calories you see on food labels are determined without any reference to human biochemistry whatsoever!
It’s true.
The calorie composition of foods is determined by burning them in a calorimeter (a fancy heat sensing lab tool) and measuring the amount of heat produced.
One calorie is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of water by 1 degree Celsius.
So we’re taking foods, burning them off and seeing how they affect the temperature of water and THEN saying that these foods will have the same effect on a living, breathing human being?
Doesn’t that seem just a little… odd?
And it gets even odder when you consider that the test material used to assess calories against (water) actually heats at different rates depending on the altitude of where you are while you’re heating it. For example, at sea level water boils at 100ºC, whereas it boils at 96 degrees at around 6000ft and 72 degrees at the top of Mount Everest.
So, if a calorie is nothing but a measurement of how much heat it takes to warm water and the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of water differs depending upon location, then what’s the point of using it?
How does this relate to human beings?
The short answers to both questions are a) there’s no point and b) it doesn’t relate at all.”
-Dax Moy
I couldn’t have said it any better.
Hormones and availability of nutrient-dense food choices will trump the faulty measurement of energy (known as a calorie) ANY day.
Take it from Dax and from myself. It’s time to stop choosing our food based on caloric content. Instead, it’s time to look at the ingredients on the label rather than the number of calories in a serving size.
Eating healthy doesn’t need to be that complicated…