WHY YOU SHOULDN'T TRUST CALORIE COUNTS
By greatist.com - Emily Shoemaker
Yes, it’s possible to lose weight eating only Twinkies,
provided that your calories in are less than your calories out. And it’s that
logic that leads many people to conclude that calories are simple math. Even
astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted, "A weight-loss book by
physicists would be one sentence long: 'Consume calories at a lower rate than
your body burns them.'" Trouble is, things are not that straightforward.
CALORIES IN
Calorie
counts are everywhere these days, from fast food menus to fitness trackers. You
might even be able to rattle off the calories in a cup of spinach. But what
exactly is a calorie?
In short,
it’s a measurement of energy; the “calories” seen on nutrition labels describes
the amount of energy needed to heat up a gram of water by one degree Celsius.
But the energy in the cranberry muffin you just ate doesn’t go to heating up
water; instead, it provides fuel for a number of processes in the body,
including staying alive and breathing. So figuring out how many calories are in
that muffin is a bit more complicated.
How Calories Are Measured
To determine
the total energy content of a food, scientists use a fancy-pants piece of
scientific equipment known as a bomb calorimeter. Into this device goes our
muffin, which gets completely incinerated. During that muffin-burning process,
the bomb calorimeter measures the heat produced. This number represents the
total amount of energy—or what is known as the “gross energy”—of the muffin.
No comments:
Post a Comment