14 ms·

The Hidden Truths about Calories

239 points by jamesbritt 14y ago

rm999 14y ago
Good article on why counting calories precisely is pointless and misleading. Another factor is that food labels are often incorrect - the FDA allows them to be up to 20% off in the USA. Even if you could figure out how many calories you consume and absorb, estimating the number of calories you burn is even more difficult.
- MichaelApproved 14y ago
  Counting calories might be misleading but it's definitely not pointless. You still want to target a range of calories during the day and not go over it. Even with the inaccuracies of the system, counting calories is still part of keeping healthy.
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    I rely on more of a feedback loop. I eat when I'm hungry, and I monitor simple metrics like my weight, sense of well being, endurance, and physique. I adjust my food intake (but still keying off when I'm hungry), and watch the results.
    - zrail 14y ago
      The problem with relying on hunger is that, for many people, that hungry signal doesn't shut off at the right time. The Hacker's Diet[1] goes into this in great detail, but the gist is that scale weight + calorie counting is a good proxy for replacing a broken hunger signal. This is one of those things that's really hard to understand unless you experience it, so don't worry if you don't get it. [1]: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
      - sliverstorm 14y ago
        Nah, I can understand that. I'm actually mildly hungry much of the time; part of tuning that feedback loop is identifying what level of "hungry" to consider, well, hungry.
  - kwantam 14y ago
    Absolutely. Counting calories is a fast feedback loop (count each day, compare to your target, increase or decrease your intake as appropriate); you need a slow feedback loop to set the intermediate target against your actual goal (in this case, say, scale weight). The accuracy of the fast feedback loop isn't critical since you have a pretty accurate slow feedback loop to correct it. The general approach of partitioning problem solving into fast/inaccurate and slow/accurate is very useful, since it's generally hard to make something that's simultaneously fast and accurate. Note one other interesting thing about this approach: you can do unit conversions! That is, I can measure something with different units than the thing I'm trying to control. Our reference is body weight, but what we measure is caloric intake: the function we use to slowly adjust the calorie target as a function of our weight has units of calories per body mass.
  - rm999 14y ago
    How do you know what range of calories to target? Or that the labels are correct? How many calories are in the burger from that food truck? That the calories you are eating are healthy? I agree with you that it's good to know roughly how many calories are in your food, but literally counting calories during a diet can be counterproductive. Most people won't count calories in the longterm, so it ends up being a bandaid solution that doesn't encourage lifestyle changes. Ultimately listening to your body (for me this includes semi-regularly weighing myself and checking my body fat %) gives a better idea of how much you should be eating and leads to a stable, longterm solution.
    - cuu508 14y ago
      Labels might be 20% off or even 50% off, but still give you ballpark figure, and is better than nothing. I haven't had patience to precisely track calories, but I find it enlightening to look at labels and compare. For example, my intuition tells peanuts are more calory-dense than carrots. But by how much? Oh, 14x! That's good to know--1kg of raw carrots might barely cover one meal, but 1kg of peanuts would power me for 3 days--careful!
      - rm999 14y ago
        >I haven't had patience to precisely track calories, but I find it enlightening to look at labels and compare Yes, absolutely, everyone should do this (I certainly know how many calories are on the label of most things I eat). But you aren't counting calories.
    - gnaritas 14y ago
      I think you miss the point of calorie counting in the first place. You count calories so that you become aware of just how excessively you've been overeating without noticing it, and where those calories are coming from. It doesn't have to be that accurate.
      - rm999 14y ago
        I realize the point, I think it's the wrong way to lose weight (and I say this as someone who lost considerable weight and has kept it off for more than ten years). Counting calories temporarily tells someone how much he is overeating, but the problem is the amount he eats is an ingrained habit. Habits die hard, eating less for a couple months doesn't change anything for most people. There is a lot of evidence that most people who diet put the weight back on because they took temporary measures to lose weight instead of making deep lifestyle changes. [Anecdotal evidence alert]: making deep lifestyle changes was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, and I believe counting calories would have distracted me from that goal.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - speleding 14y ago
    If you add up all the error margins in the article (and they don't even mention that the FDA allows published calorie counts to be off by 20%) you end up with an error margin that makes the resulting number pointless. I know the hacker in you wants a number to measure but if you know anything about math at all you should concede that calculating numbers which such a high error margin is indeed pointless.
- heretohelp 14y ago
  >Good article on why counting calories precisely is pointless and misleading. It's really not, you just need to eat healthy relatively unprocessed food for which it is reasonable to estimate calories and start with a baseline calorie target and adjust according to your goals as you go. This subject happens to be uh...my job...so I can answer questions if anyone has any.
  - rm999 14y ago
    > relatively unprocessed food for which it is reasonable to estimate calories What I got out of the article is unprocessed foods are the least accurate when it comes to calorie counts because they aren't digested as easily. What's your job BTW?
    - heretohelp 14y ago
      http://nutrivise.com http://nutrivise.com
  - JoeAltmaier 14y ago
    The article seems to contradict that - unprocessed foods are the hardest to estimate. Pounding, grinding, cooking free available calories, bringing them closer to the published number.
    - heretohelp 14y ago
      I'd say portion control is a bigger problem than any of the things you just listed. The amount of effort it takes your digestive system to process raw chicken vs. cooked chicken is obviously different, but the fact that they chose to focus on these issues doesn't make them more impactful than portion control. I was thinking in terms of cooking at home versus going to eat at a restaurant. Restaurants are far more egregious in terms of being calorific as well as highly variable and prepackaged food usually isn't that good for you.
  - vijayr 14y ago
    1. The comment above says "upto 20%" - that seems a bit high, no? Is it not possible to make better estimate of calories? 2. Any thoughts/experience with raw foods? (also juicing, water fasting etc? someone documented their water fast, I can't remember the URL now. It sounded dangerous, but also awesome to know the results) 3. For a moderately active person, which is better? Eating 2 huge meals a day, or 5-6 small meals? Thank you.
- mistercow 14y ago
  Whether or not the raw numbers correspond 1:1 to actual calories doesn't really matter. What matters is that you adjust your caloric intake based on whether you are gaining or losing weight, and which direction you need to be moving in. Even though the relative amounts aren't necessarily exactly correct, it gives you a basis for adjustment. The same goes for counting calories burned while exercising. You may not be able to figure out an exact count, but you can get in the ballpark, and that means that you can then adjust your habits so that you are moving toward your goal. Counting the calories precisely will not allow you to scientifically formulate an optimal diet and exercise plan on paper without experimenting on yourself. It will, however, anchor you and protect you against fudging the numbers in the direction of letting you eat more or exercise less. You could, I suppose, use an unbiased rounding system to try and use only as many bits of calorie information as you believe are significant, but that's a lot more work for very little theoretical gain.
  - enraged_camel 14y ago
    >>Whether or not the raw numbers correspond 1:1 to actual calories doesn't really matter. What matters is that you adjust your caloric intake based on whether you are gaining or losing weight, and which direction you need to be moving in. Even though the relative amounts aren't necessarily exactly correct, it gives you a basis for adjustment. But that's the point: you cannot make accurate adjustments unless you also keep track of the type of food you eat (cooked, processed, raw, etc.). Because you have no way of knowing whether you gained weight due to taking too many calories, or because the food you ate last week was processed and cooked.
    - dredmorbius 14y ago
      That's one of the reasons that people who make modulating their body composition a key priority (bodybuilders) often stick to very consistent diets. By not varying the type, quality, and preparation of the food, they can modulate quantity for desired effects (bulking, cutting).
      - enraged_camel 14y ago
unreal37 14y ago
Fascinating article. Well worth the read if you have an interest in diets and nutrition. Why is it scientists can't get an accurate grasp on the calorie content of foods, and how our bodies process them?
- heretohelp 14y ago
  It's immensely complicated.
  - grhino 14y ago
    and from the article, can vary greatly by individual
  - unreal37 14y ago
    It seems to me that the effect of food on the body has been studied for at least 50 years. No matter how complicated it is, shouldn't there be a few basic things everyone can agree on? It seems that each new diet (based on scientific principles) contradicts the last. Low fat, low carb, low calorie, vegan, no dairy, no wheat... They can't even agree on whether a calorie matters. (i.e. is eating 100 calories of steak vs eating 100 calories of sugar the same?)
    - tedunangst 14y ago
      It seems that each new diet (based on scientific principles) contradicts the last. Nobody gets paid for solving solved problems.
- tokenadult 14y ago
  Why is it scientists can't get an accurate grasp on the calorie content of foods, and how our bodies process them? I just posted another article that talks about the difficulty of doing human nutrition studies. Way back in the 1970s, I saw a television news magazine report about a group of nutrition researchers who found human volunteer subjects who were willing to be shut away from their normal life for weeks (months?) at a time (being paid for their time, as I recall) in conditions under which EVERYTHING the subjects ate was weighed to the nearest gram. The TV report even showed researchers washing crumbs off plates with distilled water so that the subjects ate every morsel of their measured meals. That was part of a study designed to elicit new information about human nutrition. Alas, I've never heard of results of that study. (Probably, the sample size was too small to have adequate statistical power to reach any firm conclusions.) This will always be the problem with human nutrition studies: people think they remember how much they eat, but often enough they don't really remember in detail, and the usual study methodology for a nutrition study is to rely on subject self-reports. If the sample size is extremely large, sometimes there is enough statistical power to pick up a few tantalizing signals from masses of carefully gathered data, but then there is still the whole issue of how well actual human beings apply advice based on the studies that have been done to date. I am amazed at how much day-by-day obesity in very young people I now see in my town. I never imagined that most Americas in my generation or the younger generation would be as bulky as they now are. And the United States isn't even at the top of the world league tables in obesity. People all around the world today have eating tendencies based on human beings evolving in conditions of food scarcity, but there are fewer and fewer places each decade that still suffer from food scarcity. (Ethiopia is still poor, but it is now a food-exporting country.) The challenge for humankind in the remaining years of my life will be learning how to do what is "unnatural" and eat less than what is readily available to eat.
creamyhorror 14y ago
This is very interesting. "Calories in, calories out" has long been an established principle and topic of debate & discussion among those who follow nutrition, and while it largely still applies, this article points out the factors that bend it somewhat. I wonder about the compositional effects of diet on the way ingested calories are used, too: studies have shown that isocaloric high-protein diets result in increased lean/muscle mass and lower fat mass, compared to high-carb ones. It would be nice to have a survey article to read on recent studies in this area, if anyone would be so kind. I liked this factoid in the article: "Back when it was the craze to measure such variety European scientists discovered that Russian intestines are about five feet longer than those of, say, Italians." Useful adaptation there (I wonder if it tends to make Russian guts any bigger?)
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Here's the core problem. At a fundamental level the thermodynamic argument with regard to body weight has to work, of course it does, there's no way to slip past the laws of physics. If you eat little enough and exercise enough you will lose weight, period, full stop. But by the same token, it's a useless fact, utterly. Look at the same argument as applied to finances. If you make more money than you spend you will build up savings until eventually you are rich. The issue is that these are trivial facts. They don't tackle the core difficulties of the problem they are just bland tautologies. Ultimately long-term weight loss is a complex matter of psychology, motivation, habits, and indeed personal temperament and genetic baggage. For some folks it will come naturally and easily, for others it will always be an uphill climb, and for others it will be almost impossible. And the same thing is true with regards to being wealthy. Some folks quickly and intuitively acquire the skills to step into a business, tweak the knobs until its profitable and then start building up their personal finances from those profits until they have a desire to move on to something else where they do the same thing, continuing to get richer and richer over time. Whereas for others it can be much more of a struggle, or maybe even effectively impossible because they don't have the same opportunities.
  - aneth4 14y ago
    > Here's the core problem. At a fundamental level the thermodynamic argument with regard to body weight has to work, of course it does, there's no way to slip past the laws of physics. If you eat little enough and exercise enough you will lose weight, period, full stop. This is just not true. Our bodies follow the laws of thermodynamics, but the laws of thermodynamics do not dictate how or whether we process calories. We can poop out fat. If you drink a bottle of olive oil, you will probably not digest it all. If you eat fiber, you won't process those calories. Our bodies are not bunsen burners.
gxs 14y ago
If this is at all interesting to you, I highly recommend Gary Taubes' Why We Get Fat and What to Do About it (http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307272702 http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307272702) which is a more accessible version of his more rigorous book Good Calories, Bad calories. I've been on a bit of a health binge since the beginning of the year and have been doing lots of research into these things. In a nutshell, not all calories are the same the some can wreak havoc on your system (grains, it turns out, aren't that good for us). The Paleo Solution, by Robb Wolf, is another great book - he goes to great lengths to discuss the science and biochemistry behind the points he is making. Highly recommend.
- heretohelp 14y ago
  Taubes isn't taken seriously by most dieticians and nutrition researchers we talk to (I work at a nutrition startup). I'd say that if there is any value to Taubes, it is this: Different foods, given the same calories, will fill you up or nourish you at varying degrees. 300 calories of oreo cookies isn't the same as eating a banana and some chicken. The main practical benefit people get from low carb, paleo, etc is that they're eating less sugar and junk, and thus eating healthy food with better overall satiety. As a result, they lose weight because they're eating fewer calories. You can lose weight eating twinkies, it's just hard to do because it's bad for your health, not nutritious, and leaves you feeling hungry because it's all carbs. A more scientific and less paleo-obsessed way to think about carbohydrates is this: Carbs are fuel, if you're an athlete, you have a use for them. If you live a sedentary lifestyle, excess fuel isn't going to do you any favors. Adjust accordingly. In the end: calories in, calories out. Humanity hasn't defeated the laws of thermodynamics. It's just a question of how easy and healthy it is to maintain a sub-maintenance caloric intake. Edit: Okay people, I just got done saying low carb made sense if you weren't an athlete, what exactly are you arguing against? I agree with you guys, I just think the reasoning and rationale should be taken in the context of current nutrition research and not some demagogue's book that is obsessed with a dietary aesthetic rather than data.
  - joelrunyon 14y ago
    >In the end: calories in, calories out. If you're just talking about "weight loss" then yea, that's right, but you don't address body composition at all here. If you just wanted to "lose weight", then you could chop off an arm and BOOM, you just lost weight. What MOST people want to do is to burn and lose fat, NOT weight - they just express it differently. If it was just calories in vs calories out, I could drink 3000 calories of vodka a day and still be okay as long as I burned off 3100 calories, and we all know that's not the case.
mberning 14y ago
It's crazy to me that 'counting calories' is something people routinely take for granted. It is a uniquely human trait. No other animal in this world has a need to do this. Humans up until a hundred years ago (or so) had no need to do it. What the hell has happened? My opinion - food processing and the agricultural revolution. A metabolic derangement caused by overly processed agricultural products.
- Devilboy 14y ago
  Our diets changed. If we revert to eating what humans ate 100,000 years ago we do NOT need to count calories and we do not get fat. What happened is we started cooking and eating things that could not be eaten raw, like grains, potatoes and so on. If you eat only stuff that can be eaten raw your body will do a pretty good job of maintaining your ideal weight without counting calories (assuming you don't have a thyroid problem or something of course)
  - lwat 14y ago
    We got the 'food pyramid' which told everyone that eating loads of carbs is good for you and eating fat in any form is bad. It's gonna take decades to reverse this mistake.
  - vacri 14y ago
    We will also end up being a lot shorter by eating the diet of ages past, which suggests that that is not the optimal diet either.
    - lwat 14y ago
      I've not heard about this, you got a source for me?
      - vacri 14y ago
        Looks like I am mistaken. We're taller than we have been for the past few hundred years, but there is evidence of some earlier humans having similar heights as modern humans. There is no mention of the cooked/raw status of those particular ancestors' diets, though. I don't have a particular reference, just piecing together the non-trash results of googling 'diet height' and 'history of human height'.
simonbrown 14y ago
The article mentions that the potatoes and beef were organic (I assume as in organic food): > Carmody fed adult, male mice organic sweet potatoes What is the significance of this?
- unreal37 14y ago
  I would assume the molecular makeup of food is modified by what you use to grow it. An organic potato might be smaller and more nutrient-dense than a chemically-grown one.
- cracell 14y ago
  I'd assume making them organic helps to control for a pesticide or herbicide in them that could be changing the result. Not the best control but better than nothing.
Aloisius 14y ago
If this is true, it makes counting calories incredibly hard for anyone who has a varied diet. If each ingredient in the food you eat is digested at a different efficiency depending on the bacteria in your gut and other specifics of your digestive system and the food itself varies by upwards of 20% because of natural variation and how much you cook it, then it seems it would be downright impossible. I've tried in the past and given up (I would gain weight on a 1200 calorie diet of processed diet food). I finally just went to an extreme nearly vegan diet where I get over 90% of my calories from plants and exclude grains, oil, sugar and salt. It makes it virtually impossible to overeat even if I have to eat 4x the mass of food other people.
- 001sky 14y ago
  It would be very interesting to see an entropy factor for common foods, and in particukar things that don't digest (nuts, etc). Like a reference table.
- engtech 14y ago
  I too have used that approach, and the only problem I've found is because I'm still used to taking in a large mass of low calorie raw foods, if I'm in a situation where the type of food I'd normally eat isn't available, then I have the capacity to really pig out.
raghavmohan 14y ago
Unrelated to the topic, but all the "X is not a X" subtopics remind of this interesting paper I read not too long ago titled "A File is Not a File: Understanding the I/O Behavior of Apple Desktop Applications"(http://research.cs.wisc.edu/wind/Publications/ibench-sosp11.pdf http://research.cs.wisc.edu/wind/Publications/ibench-sosp11....)
grecy 14y ago
>nine calories per gram <imperial unit> per <metric unit>. Must be an American article.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  ORLY? calorie: the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one kilogram (sometimes, one gram) of water one degree centigrade.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - vacri 14y ago
    It's not an imperial unit, but it's not an SI unit either. One glaring example of it's inappropriateness is that the 'calorie' varies depending on what you're measuring (as you say, sometimes a gram, sometimes a kilogram). The SI unit is the joule.
    - dredmorbius 14y ago
      I'll accept that. The calorie / Calorie / Kilocalorie confusion is pretty annoying. Apparently EU food labeling may be in either kcal or kJ (at ~4.2 kJ/kcal).
      - whatusername 14y ago
        Australian labelling must be in kJ (but it will often have the kcal amount listed as well)
- MSM 14y ago
  It took you that long into an article on 'Scientific American' to realize it was an American article?
- UnFleshedOne 14y ago
  Nah, mixing imperial and metric is a canadian thing. They even do it in aviation, which I find insane...
itmag 14y ago
Has anyone here tried Seth Roberts' Shangri-La Diet?
- natrius 14y ago
  Tried it. The main side effect is how silly people will think you are when you explain it. You do end up eating less, but I think a lot of the responsibility goes to the flavor-free periods you need in the day.
lwat 14y ago
Everyone is an expert on diet.
Dove 14y ago
I think that's more academically interesting than it is practically useful. Some of the foods I eat may have calorie counts that are off by 20 or 30 percent? That's noise. Being on an 1100 diet that you think is 1400 (or vice versa) doesn't matter that much. What matters is that it isn't 3500--something that can easily happen by accident if you don't pay attention.
niels_olson 14y ago
If you want to experiment with your own dietary in-out behavior, I recommend you institute a change for 3 months and then plot the diff using this http://bwsimulator.niddk.nih.gov/ http://bwsimulator.niddk.nih.gov/ It mathematically modelled from data of many large, longitudinal studies (Nurses' Health, Framingham, etc). As a physician who reduced caloric intake in January, I've found the bwsimulator to be very predictive and informative on how I can modify things further in the future. But you really do need a couple of data points on yourself to plug in first.
charlieok 14y ago
What would help me is if it were easy to track this stuff. When I get the receipt at a restaurant, why isn't there a nutrition label printed on it, like the ones in grocery stores? Why aren't there QR encodings of nutrition labels for easy scanning by your choice of tracking app? I see opportunity for improvement here :)
dhughes 14y ago
All any fad diet boils down to is "how can I eat like a pig, not exercise and stay thin?" and sell books about the diet.
emmelaich 14y ago
For me, I'm mostly convinced of the paleo view. It's by no means the only valid view or the whole view but I'm convinced by numerous anecdotes from people I know personally and elsewhere. Here's one quote from Anna Karenina which suggests that a similar approach was well known in Tolstoy's time: On the day of the races at Krasnoe Selo, Vronsky had come earlier than usual to eat beefsteak in the common messroom of the regiment. He had no need to be strict with himself, as he had very quickly been brought down to the required light weight; but still he had to avoid gaining flesh, and so he eschewed farinaceous and sweet dishes

239 points by jamesbritt 14y ago

rm999 14y ago

Good article on why counting calories precisely is pointless and misleading. Another factor is that food labels are often incorrect - the FDA allows them to be up to 20% off in the USA. Even if you could figure out how many calories you consume and absorb, estimating the number of calories you burn is even more difficult.

MichaelApproved 14y ago
Counting calories might be misleading but it's definitely not pointless. You still want to target a range of calories during the day and not go over it. Even with the inaccuracies of the system, counting calories is still part of keeping healthy.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  I rely on more of a feedback loop. I eat when I'm hungry, and I monitor simple metrics like my weight, sense of well being, endurance, and physique. I adjust my food intake (but still keying off when I'm hungry), and watch the results.
  - zrail 14y ago
    The problem with relying on hunger is that, for many people, that hungry signal doesn't shut off at the right time. The Hacker's Diet[1] goes into this in great detail, but the gist is that scale weight + calorie counting is a good proxy for replacing a broken hunger signal. This is one of those things that's really hard to understand unless you experience it, so don't worry if you don't get it. [1]: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
    - sliverstorm 14y ago
      Nah, I can understand that. I'm actually mildly hungry much of the time; part of tuning that feedback loop is identifying what level of "hungry" to consider, well, hungry.
- kwantam 14y ago
  Absolutely. Counting calories is a fast feedback loop (count each day, compare to your target, increase or decrease your intake as appropriate); you need a slow feedback loop to set the intermediate target against your actual goal (in this case, say, scale weight). The accuracy of the fast feedback loop isn't critical since you have a pretty accurate slow feedback loop to correct it. The general approach of partitioning problem solving into fast/inaccurate and slow/accurate is very useful, since it's generally hard to make something that's simultaneously fast and accurate. Note one other interesting thing about this approach: you can do unit conversions! That is, I can measure something with different units than the thing I'm trying to control. Our reference is body weight, but what we measure is caloric intake: the function we use to slowly adjust the calorie target as a function of our weight has units of calories per body mass.
- rm999 14y ago
  How do you know what range of calories to target? Or that the labels are correct? How many calories are in the burger from that food truck? That the calories you are eating are healthy? I agree with you that it's good to know roughly how many calories are in your food, but literally counting calories during a diet can be counterproductive. Most people won't count calories in the longterm, so it ends up being a bandaid solution that doesn't encourage lifestyle changes. Ultimately listening to your body (for me this includes semi-regularly weighing myself and checking my body fat %) gives a better idea of how much you should be eating and leads to a stable, longterm solution.
  - cuu508 14y ago
    Labels might be 20% off or even 50% off, but still give you ballpark figure, and is better than nothing. I haven't had patience to precisely track calories, but I find it enlightening to look at labels and compare. For example, my intuition tells peanuts are more calory-dense than carrots. But by how much? Oh, 14x! That's good to know--1kg of raw carrots might barely cover one meal, but 1kg of peanuts would power me for 3 days--careful!
    - rm999 14y ago
      >I haven't had patience to precisely track calories, but I find it enlightening to look at labels and compare Yes, absolutely, everyone should do this (I certainly know how many calories are on the label of most things I eat). But you aren't counting calories.
  - gnaritas 14y ago
    I think you miss the point of calorie counting in the first place. You count calories so that you become aware of just how excessively you've been overeating without noticing it, and where those calories are coming from. It doesn't have to be that accurate.
    - rm999 14y ago
      I realize the point, I think it's the wrong way to lose weight (and I say this as someone who lost considerable weight and has kept it off for more than ten years). Counting calories temporarily tells someone how much he is overeating, but the problem is the amount he eats is an ingrained habit. Habits die hard, eating less for a couple months doesn't change anything for most people. There is a lot of evidence that most people who diet put the weight back on because they took temporary measures to lose weight instead of making deep lifestyle changes. [Anecdotal evidence alert]: making deep lifestyle changes was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, and I believe counting calories would have distracted me from that goal.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- speleding 14y ago
  If you add up all the error margins in the article (and they don't even mention that the FDA allows published calorie counts to be off by 20%) you end up with an error margin that makes the resulting number pointless. I know the hacker in you wants a number to measure but if you know anything about math at all you should concede that calculating numbers which such a high error margin is indeed pointless.
heretohelp 14y ago
>Good article on why counting calories precisely is pointless and misleading. It's really not, you just need to eat healthy relatively unprocessed food for which it is reasonable to estimate calories and start with a baseline calorie target and adjust according to your goals as you go. This subject happens to be uh...my job...so I can answer questions if anyone has any.
- rm999 14y ago
  > relatively unprocessed food for which it is reasonable to estimate calories What I got out of the article is unprocessed foods are the least accurate when it comes to calorie counts because they aren't digested as easily. What's your job BTW?
  - heretohelp 14y ago
    http://nutrivise.com http://nutrivise.com
- JoeAltmaier 14y ago
  The article seems to contradict that - unprocessed foods are the hardest to estimate. Pounding, grinding, cooking free available calories, bringing them closer to the published number.
  - heretohelp 14y ago
    I'd say portion control is a bigger problem than any of the things you just listed. The amount of effort it takes your digestive system to process raw chicken vs. cooked chicken is obviously different, but the fact that they chose to focus on these issues doesn't make them more impactful than portion control. I was thinking in terms of cooking at home versus going to eat at a restaurant. Restaurants are far more egregious in terms of being calorific as well as highly variable and prepackaged food usually isn't that good for you.
- vijayr 14y ago
  1. The comment above says "upto 20%" - that seems a bit high, no? Is it not possible to make better estimate of calories? 2. Any thoughts/experience with raw foods? (also juicing, water fasting etc? someone documented their water fast, I can't remember the URL now. It sounded dangerous, but also awesome to know the results) 3. For a moderately active person, which is better? Eating 2 huge meals a day, or 5-6 small meals? Thank you.
mistercow 14y ago
Whether or not the raw numbers correspond 1:1 to actual calories doesn't really matter. What matters is that you adjust your caloric intake based on whether you are gaining or losing weight, and which direction you need to be moving in. Even though the relative amounts aren't necessarily exactly correct, it gives you a basis for adjustment. The same goes for counting calories burned while exercising. You may not be able to figure out an exact count, but you can get in the ballpark, and that means that you can then adjust your habits so that you are moving toward your goal. Counting the calories precisely will not allow you to scientifically formulate an optimal diet and exercise plan on paper without experimenting on yourself. It will, however, anchor you and protect you against fudging the numbers in the direction of letting you eat more or exercise less. You could, I suppose, use an unbiased rounding system to try and use only as many bits of calorie information as you believe are significant, but that's a lot more work for very little theoretical gain.
- enraged_camel 14y ago
  >>Whether or not the raw numbers correspond 1:1 to actual calories doesn't really matter. What matters is that you adjust your caloric intake based on whether you are gaining or losing weight, and which direction you need to be moving in. Even though the relative amounts aren't necessarily exactly correct, it gives you a basis for adjustment. But that's the point: you cannot make accurate adjustments unless you also keep track of the type of food you eat (cooked, processed, raw, etc.). Because you have no way of knowing whether you gained weight due to taking too many calories, or because the food you ate last week was processed and cooked.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    That's one of the reasons that people who make modulating their body composition a key priority (bodybuilders) often stick to very consistent diets. By not varying the type, quality, and preparation of the food, they can modulate quantity for desired effects (bulking, cutting).
    - enraged_camel 14y ago

unreal37 14y ago

Fascinating article. Well worth the read if you have an interest in diets and nutrition. Why is it scientists can't get an accurate grasp on the calorie content of foods, and how our bodies process them?

heretohelp 14y ago
It's immensely complicated.
- grhino 14y ago
  and from the article, can vary greatly by individual
- unreal37 14y ago
  It seems to me that the effect of food on the body has been studied for at least 50 years. No matter how complicated it is, shouldn't there be a few basic things everyone can agree on? It seems that each new diet (based on scientific principles) contradicts the last. Low fat, low carb, low calorie, vegan, no dairy, no wheat... They can't even agree on whether a calorie matters. (i.e. is eating 100 calories of steak vs eating 100 calories of sugar the same?)
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    It seems that each new diet (based on scientific principles) contradicts the last. Nobody gets paid for solving solved problems.
tokenadult 14y ago
Why is it scientists can't get an accurate grasp on the calorie content of foods, and how our bodies process them? I just posted another article that talks about the difficulty of doing human nutrition studies. Way back in the 1970s, I saw a television news magazine report about a group of nutrition researchers who found human volunteer subjects who were willing to be shut away from their normal life for weeks (months?) at a time (being paid for their time, as I recall) in conditions under which EVERYTHING the subjects ate was weighed to the nearest gram. The TV report even showed researchers washing crumbs off plates with distilled water so that the subjects ate every morsel of their measured meals. That was part of a study designed to elicit new information about human nutrition. Alas, I've never heard of results of that study. (Probably, the sample size was too small to have adequate statistical power to reach any firm conclusions.) This will always be the problem with human nutrition studies: people think they remember how much they eat, but often enough they don't really remember in detail, and the usual study methodology for a nutrition study is to rely on subject self-reports. If the sample size is extremely large, sometimes there is enough statistical power to pick up a few tantalizing signals from masses of carefully gathered data, but then there is still the whole issue of how well actual human beings apply advice based on the studies that have been done to date. I am amazed at how much day-by-day obesity in very young people I now see in my town. I never imagined that most Americas in my generation or the younger generation would be as bulky as they now are. And the United States isn't even at the top of the world league tables in obesity. People all around the world today have eating tendencies based on human beings evolving in conditions of food scarcity, but there are fewer and fewer places each decade that still suffer from food scarcity. (Ethiopia is still poor, but it is now a food-exporting country.) The challenge for humankind in the remaining years of my life will be learning how to do what is "unnatural" and eat less than what is readily available to eat.

creamyhorror 14y ago

This is very interesting. "Calories in, calories out" has long been an established principle and topic of debate & discussion among those who follow nutrition, and while it largely still applies, this article points out the factors that bend it somewhat. I wonder about the compositional effects of diet on the way ingested calories are used, too: studies have shown that isocaloric high-protein diets result in increased lean/muscle mass and lower fat mass, compared to high-carb ones. It would be nice to have a survey article to read on recent studies in this area, if anyone would be so kind. I liked this factoid in the article: "Back when it was the craze to measure such variety European scientists discovered that Russian intestines are about five feet longer than those of, say, Italians." Useful adaptation there (I wonder if it tends to make Russian guts any bigger?)

InclinedPlane 14y ago
Here's the core problem. At a fundamental level the thermodynamic argument with regard to body weight has to work, of course it does, there's no way to slip past the laws of physics. If you eat little enough and exercise enough you will lose weight, period, full stop. But by the same token, it's a useless fact, utterly. Look at the same argument as applied to finances. If you make more money than you spend you will build up savings until eventually you are rich. The issue is that these are trivial facts. They don't tackle the core difficulties of the problem they are just bland tautologies. Ultimately long-term weight loss is a complex matter of psychology, motivation, habits, and indeed personal temperament and genetic baggage. For some folks it will come naturally and easily, for others it will always be an uphill climb, and for others it will be almost impossible. And the same thing is true with regards to being wealthy. Some folks quickly and intuitively acquire the skills to step into a business, tweak the knobs until its profitable and then start building up their personal finances from those profits until they have a desire to move on to something else where they do the same thing, continuing to get richer and richer over time. Whereas for others it can be much more of a struggle, or maybe even effectively impossible because they don't have the same opportunities.
- aneth4 14y ago
  > Here's the core problem. At a fundamental level the thermodynamic argument with regard to body weight has to work, of course it does, there's no way to slip past the laws of physics. If you eat little enough and exercise enough you will lose weight, period, full stop. This is just not true. Our bodies follow the laws of thermodynamics, but the laws of thermodynamics do not dictate how or whether we process calories. We can poop out fat. If you drink a bottle of olive oil, you will probably not digest it all. If you eat fiber, you won't process those calories. Our bodies are not bunsen burners.

gxs 14y ago

If this is at all interesting to you, I highly recommend Gary Taubes' Why We Get Fat and What to Do About it (http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307272702 http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307272702) which is a more accessible version of his more rigorous book Good Calories, Bad calories. I've been on a bit of a health binge since the beginning of the year and have been doing lots of research into these things. In a nutshell, not all calories are the same the some can wreak havoc on your system (grains, it turns out, aren't that good for us). The Paleo Solution, by Robb Wolf, is another great book - he goes to great lengths to discuss the science and biochemistry behind the points he is making. Highly recommend.

heretohelp 14y ago
Taubes isn't taken seriously by most dieticians and nutrition researchers we talk to (I work at a nutrition startup). I'd say that if there is any value to Taubes, it is this: Different foods, given the same calories, will fill you up or nourish you at varying degrees. 300 calories of oreo cookies isn't the same as eating a banana and some chicken. The main practical benefit people get from low carb, paleo, etc is that they're eating less sugar and junk, and thus eating healthy food with better overall satiety. As a result, they lose weight because they're eating fewer calories. You can lose weight eating twinkies, it's just hard to do because it's bad for your health, not nutritious, and leaves you feeling hungry because it's all carbs. A more scientific and less paleo-obsessed way to think about carbohydrates is this: Carbs are fuel, if you're an athlete, you have a use for them. If you live a sedentary lifestyle, excess fuel isn't going to do you any favors. Adjust accordingly. In the end: calories in, calories out. Humanity hasn't defeated the laws of thermodynamics. It's just a question of how easy and healthy it is to maintain a sub-maintenance caloric intake. Edit: Okay people, I just got done saying low carb made sense if you weren't an athlete, what exactly are you arguing against? I agree with you guys, I just think the reasoning and rationale should be taken in the context of current nutrition research and not some demagogue's book that is obsessed with a dietary aesthetic rather than data.
- joelrunyon 14y ago
  >In the end: calories in, calories out. If you're just talking about "weight loss" then yea, that's right, but you don't address body composition at all here. If you just wanted to "lose weight", then you could chop off an arm and BOOM, you just lost weight. What MOST people want to do is to burn and lose fat, NOT weight - they just express it differently. If it was just calories in vs calories out, I could drink 3000 calories of vodka a day and still be okay as long as I burned off 3100 calories, and we all know that's not the case.

mberning 14y ago

It's crazy to me that 'counting calories' is something people routinely take for granted. It is a uniquely human trait. No other animal in this world has a need to do this. Humans up until a hundred years ago (or so) had no need to do it. What the hell has happened? My opinion - food processing and the agricultural revolution. A metabolic derangement caused by overly processed agricultural products.

Devilboy 14y ago
Our diets changed. If we revert to eating what humans ate 100,000 years ago we do NOT need to count calories and we do not get fat. What happened is we started cooking and eating things that could not be eaten raw, like grains, potatoes and so on. If you eat only stuff that can be eaten raw your body will do a pretty good job of maintaining your ideal weight without counting calories (assuming you don't have a thyroid problem or something of course)
- lwat 14y ago
  We got the 'food pyramid' which told everyone that eating loads of carbs is good for you and eating fat in any form is bad. It's gonna take decades to reverse this mistake.
- vacri 14y ago
  We will also end up being a lot shorter by eating the diet of ages past, which suggests that that is not the optimal diet either.
  - lwat 14y ago
    I've not heard about this, you got a source for me?
    - vacri 14y ago
      Looks like I am mistaken. We're taller than we have been for the past few hundred years, but there is evidence of some earlier humans having similar heights as modern humans. There is no mention of the cooked/raw status of those particular ancestors' diets, though. I don't have a particular reference, just piecing together the non-trash results of googling 'diet height' and 'history of human height'.

simonbrown 14y ago

The article mentions that the potatoes and beef were organic (I assume as in organic food): > Carmody fed adult, male mice organic sweet potatoes What is the significance of this?

unreal37 14y ago
I would assume the molecular makeup of food is modified by what you use to grow it. An organic potato might be smaller and more nutrient-dense than a chemically-grown one.
cracell 14y ago
I'd assume making them organic helps to control for a pesticide or herbicide in them that could be changing the result. Not the best control but better than nothing.

Aloisius 14y ago

If this is true, it makes counting calories incredibly hard for anyone who has a varied diet. If each ingredient in the food you eat is digested at a different efficiency depending on the bacteria in your gut and other specifics of your digestive system and the food itself varies by upwards of 20% because of natural variation and how much you cook it, then it seems it would be downright impossible. I've tried in the past and given up (I would gain weight on a 1200 calorie diet of processed diet food). I finally just went to an extreme nearly vegan diet where I get over 90% of my calories from plants and exclude grains, oil, sugar and salt. It makes it virtually impossible to overeat even if I have to eat 4x the mass of food other people.

001sky 14y ago
It would be very interesting to see an entropy factor for common foods, and in particukar things that don't digest (nuts, etc). Like a reference table.
engtech 14y ago
I too have used that approach, and the only problem I've found is because I'm still used to taking in a large mass of low calorie raw foods, if I'm in a situation where the type of food I'd normally eat isn't available, then I have the capacity to really pig out.

raghavmohan 14y ago

Unrelated to the topic, but all the "X is not a X" subtopics remind of this interesting paper I read not too long ago titled "A File is Not a File: Understanding the I/O Behavior of Apple Desktop Applications"(http://research.cs.wisc.edu/wind/Publications/ibench-sosp11.pdf http://research.cs.wisc.edu/wind/Publications/ibench-sosp11....)

grecy 14y ago

>nine calories per gram <imperial unit> per <metric unit>. Must be an American article.

dredmorbius 14y ago
ORLY? calorie: the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one kilogram (sometimes, one gram) of water one degree centigrade.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- vacri 14y ago
  It's not an imperial unit, but it's not an SI unit either. One glaring example of it's inappropriateness is that the 'calorie' varies depending on what you're measuring (as you say, sometimes a gram, sometimes a kilogram). The SI unit is the joule.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    I'll accept that. The calorie / Calorie / Kilocalorie confusion is pretty annoying. Apparently EU food labeling may be in either kcal or kJ (at ~4.2 kJ/kcal).
    - whatusername 14y ago
      Australian labelling must be in kJ (but it will often have the kcal amount listed as well)
MSM 14y ago
It took you that long into an article on 'Scientific American' to realize it was an American article?
UnFleshedOne 14y ago
Nah, mixing imperial and metric is a canadian thing. They even do it in aviation, which I find insane...

itmag 14y ago

Has anyone here tried Seth Roberts' Shangri-La Diet?

natrius 14y ago
Tried it. The main side effect is how silly people will think you are when you explain it. You do end up eating less, but I think a lot of the responsibility goes to the flavor-free periods you need in the day.

lwat 14y ago

Everyone is an expert on diet.

Dove 14y ago

I think that's more academically interesting than it is practically useful. Some of the foods I eat may have calorie counts that are off by 20 or 30 percent? That's noise. Being on an 1100 diet that you think is 1400 (or vice versa) doesn't matter that much. What matters is that it isn't 3500--something that can easily happen by accident if you don't pay attention.

niels_olson 14y ago

If you want to experiment with your own dietary in-out behavior, I recommend you institute a change for 3 months and then plot the diff using this http://bwsimulator.niddk.nih.gov/ http://bwsimulator.niddk.nih.gov/ It mathematically modelled from data of many large, longitudinal studies (Nurses' Health, Framingham, etc). As a physician who reduced caloric intake in January, I've found the bwsimulator to be very predictive and informative on how I can modify things further in the future. But you really do need a couple of data points on yourself to plug in first.

charlieok 14y ago

What would help me is if it were easy to track this stuff. When I get the receipt at a restaurant, why isn't there a nutrition label printed on it, like the ones in grocery stores? Why aren't there QR encodings of nutrition labels for easy scanning by your choice of tracking app? I see opportunity for improvement here :)

dhughes 14y ago

All any fad diet boils down to is "how can I eat like a pig, not exercise and stay thin?" and sell books about the diet.

emmelaich 14y ago

For me, I'm mostly convinced of the paleo view. It's by no means the only valid view or the whole view but I'm convinced by numerous anecdotes from people I know personally and elsewhere. Here's one quote from Anna Karenina which suggests that a similar approach was well known in Tolstoy's time: On the day of the races at Krasnoe Selo, Vronsky had come earlier than usual to eat beefsteak in the common messroom of the regiment. He had no need to be strict with himself, as he had very quickly been brought down to the required light weight; but still he had to avoid gaining flesh, and so he eschewed farinaceous and sweet dishes