Calorie counts, which are based on the energy released by burning a small amount of food under laboratory conditions, are not, it turns out, an accurate representation of what happens to food in the human body, and the inaccuracies can wreak havoc with your weight-conscious choices.
This article in
NewScientist explains what's going on, and how a chocolate brownie (labeled to contain 250 calories) might be higher in actual, real-life calories than a muesli bar (at 300 calories). There are quite a few factors affecting actual calorie count from the body's point of view, including cooked vs. raw and consuming food in big pieces vs. small.
Here's one of several examples from the article: "Kentaro Murakami and Satoshi Sasaki, both at the University of Tokyo in Japan, surveyed 450 female students about their eating habits and then classified the food they ate according to how difficult it was to chew. They found that women who ate the hardest foods had significantly slimmer waistlines than those who ate the softest foods (
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol 86, p206 )."
Since calorie content labeling is not about to change, and probably doesn't need to for most uses, WNL thinks women might like to know what's really going on with calories when they cross over into our bodies. Hope you agree.
This article in NewScientist explains what's going on, and how a chocolate brownie (labeled to contain 250 calories) might be higher in actual, real-life calories than a muesli bar (at 300 calories). There are quite a few factors affecting actual calorie count from the body's point of view, including cooked vs. raw and consuming food in big pieces vs. small.
Here's one of several examples from the article: "Kentaro Murakami and Satoshi Sasaki, both at the University of Tokyo in Japan, surveyed 450 female students about their eating habits and then classified the food they ate according to how difficult it was to chew. They found that women who ate the hardest foods had significantly slimmer waistlines than those who ate the softest foods ( American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol 86, p206 )."
Since calorie content labeling is not about to change, and probably doesn't need to for most uses, WNL thinks women might like to know what's really going on with calories when they cross over into our bodies. Hope you agree.