Calorie counting, is it a scam?

Three cucumbers, two heads of lettuce and three carrots equals 100 calories but a quarter tablespoon of ranch dressing easily adds another 100 calories. Half a cup of chickpeas is 100 calories but only four tablespoons of hummus, this is because hummus contains olive oil that is high in fats.

Bringing up the calorie count but, what is a calorie? A calorie is simply a measurement of energy. When it comes to food a calorie with an upper kc, now this is important weirdly is the amount of energy it takes to heat up one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius in other words it's basically how much energy is available in the foods that we eat.

We've become so obsessed with counting calories because if we eat more energy than we can use that extra energy. Actually, can get stored in our bodies as fat or muscles and our society seems to be obsessed with fat and muscles but the way we actually calculate calories in foods is based on the at water system which is derived from experiments done over a hundred years ago.

Basically Mr. Atwater said four calories per gram of protein, nine calories per gram in fat and four calories per gram in carbohydrates but we now know not all calories are the same where you get the calories from matters. Most of us may have heard the term empty calories it refers to foods that have lots of calories but little of the nutrients.

Our bodies need to literally survive a small amount of m and m 's contains 100 calories but no vitamins and only one percent of the calcium and iron. You need 100 calories of hazelnuts on the other hand will give you a good chunk of your daily vitamin E and magnesium. This is one example of why canning calories can be unhealthy but also, we are confusing 100 calories is a third of a chicken breast or a quarter cup of macaroni with nothing else hashtag white people food or a third of an impossible burger patty or one third of a scotch egg, half a veggie sushi roll or 3 ounces of palak paneer.

You could make a smoothie with half a banana 12.5 strawberries 65 blueberries which is 100 calories or just make a smoothie with water and protein powder. As most protein powders tend to be 100 calories per serving and long after Mr Atwater died, we learned a lot about our metabolism.

It's not just calories in, there's a wide range of factors that affect how our calories and the food we eat affects our bodies. It all starts with physically breaking apart the food and our mouth chewing these smaller chewed up bites go down as abolish to our stomach where acid breaks down cell walls.

We get into the small intestine where lots of enzymes and bacteria get to work breaking down molecules into glucose which we can use in our cells for energy in this process calories aren't treated all the same in our body. It takes more energy to break down protein than carbohydrates, so the net gain of calories is higher with carbs for example 100 calories of turkey slices takes more energy to digest than 100 calories of vanilla buttercream cake.

Processing food helps humans extract lots of calories even simple mashing and heating starts the process of breaking down food so there's less our bodies have to do heavy duty processed food yields more calories for the same reason so a handful of raw grains would be hard for our body to digest and mostly pass through as fiber so we wouldn't absorb many calories but a yummy slice of multi-grain bread would give us 109 calories but even then once the food is ground or cooked our bodies absorb again these calories differently that slice of bread might be a good source of nutrients for one person but a trip to the bathroom for someone with celiac disease.

celiac is a genetic disease that's essentially an allergen to gluten that's just one example of how genetics affects our digestion but it's not just genetics. It's also our microbiome too, all those tens of trillions of bacteria, archaea and other microbes mostly in your gut make up your microbiome without them we couldn't break down basic foods.

For instance, the microbiome helps babies break down sugars from the mother's milk. This is important but everyone's microbiome is slightly different so people can access different nutrients based on their microbiome, for example about 50 of those living in Asia can break down certain compounds in soy while only 25 to 30 percent of people in north America.

Can the delicate balance of microbes might be set early in childhood. we get our first dose of bacteria from our mama but then it changes based on what we eat and what's in our environment. These shifts could alter the way calories are absorbed.

The ability to break down soy is actually decreasing in younger generations in Japan, maybe due to the rise of a more western diet. Most people have a combination of two types of bacteria in their gut Bacteroidetes and Fermicutes. Studies show that people with a greater proportion of fermicutes tend to be more obese. Mice given a micro biome transplant from obese sources tend to gain weight, when fed the same diet.

This microbe combo could break down sugars more easily and be so efficient at extracting calories from food that rather than just passing through more calories get absorbed and stored as fat. This could explain why two people could eat lots of 100 calorie servings of peanut butter candy and one person gains weight while their other friend doesn't at all.

So the caloric value of anything meat, fruit, bread, veggies will change based on your microbiome, the way it's processed your genetics so it feels like maybe it's time for us to change the concept of what a calorie is go forth and feast with this new knowledge. Thank you for reading my story and make sure you are subscribed for more new stories. Happy Eating, Happy Living.