For the purpose of losing weight it really doesn't matter if the calorie counts are accurate or not: consistency is what is important.
If you want to lose weight reliably, track your weight and your caloric intake consistently. If you aren't losing weight, adjust your caloric intake until you are losing weight at a steady ~1-2lb per week.
Losing weight is simple...it's not easy, but it's very simple.
edit: You also should continually track this because as you lose weight, your body uses less energy and your maintenance level goes down meaning you may need to adjust your calories down a bit to compensate.
Right, I fear that this is another article that, while interesting, will be used to needlessly complicate discussions about weight loss. Paying attention to the (inexact) reported calorie information on the food you eat is still the only reliable way to lose weight.
I don't know, if losing weight is so simple, I'd assume obesity rates won't be as high as 80% in USA during the "diet/health" craze phase we have going on. Theres gotta be other factors that we just don't know about, like metabolization, which will be ultimately what drives obesity down.
"For the purpose of losing weight it really doesn't matter if the calorie counts are accurate or not"
Pretty basic math tells you even a very small percent wrong (1-2) would affect weight gain/loss over the course of a year :)
I'm also not sure what you mean by "consistency". You say " If you aren't losing weight, adjust your caloric intake until you are losing weight at a steady ~1-2lb per week."
How can you adjust your caloric intake if you don't know the real numbers?
I guess you are assuming you eat literally the same thing every week, and drop stuff on the floor until you have a set of foods you know make you lose weight, and then only eat that for the rest of your life? That seems a bad strategy to keep weight off. Most people would probably be willing to eat less of something (which they sanely could if they knew the real calorie counts), but probably not change their entire diet and keep it steady forever.
Even if you just reduce the number of calories to try to account for all the inaccuracies, you are still in a situation where you actually have no idea what you can or can't eat.
IE i you say "well, 1500 calories a day didn't work, i'll try 1000", in practice, some days you will have eaten 1500, some days, 900. Your claim this will just average out magically is patently false (it only averages out over time if the numbers are less than a certain percentage away from right, and that percent is very small).
If you are eating different combinations of things, the likelihood you will ever find which are wrong/right, so you know to eat less/more of it, seems really slim. You still have zero idea what you can eat for real, and you'll still find if you swap what foods you eat, you may start gaining/losing weight. So "consistency" or whatever you want to call it, doesn't make any sense.
Now, i'll grant there may be no other way to accomplish your goal right now, but suggesting this is a good method is wrong. It's a horrible method. This is like trying to optimize a multivariable constraint problem through random guessing.
They say "all wrong" but they appear to mean "not perfectly accurate." Given that calorie counting is one of the most successful methods for gaining control of weight, that's not just semantics; that's unethical.
The author is to blame for this unfortunate headline. "Humans engage in a kind of tug-of-war with the food we eat, a battle in which we are measuring the spoils--calories--all wrong."
Additionally, as far as I know they typically overestimate the caloric value. Which means the error will almost always work IN FAVOR of someone calorie counting to lose weight.
Interesting, but still mostly fiddling with details and niche cases. I found that simply "counting calories" (more like roughly keeping track of them in the back of my head) as written on the labels and then reducing my daily consumption by 25-30% to be the only reliable way to lose weight. No hassle, you can eat what you want and you aren't even that hungry. Those labels might be off by 10% or even 30+% at times but, ultimately, that should barely matter.
That doesn't make sense. If calories are all that matter, then simple math shows that being off by 2% over the course of the years easily leads to weight loss or gains. You've seen this math numerous times in the context of "if you just didn't eat one donut hole a day you'd weight X pounds less a year". If the labels are off by 10% or 30%, then it can't be just "calories are all that matter"; you'd be losing or gaining a dozen pounds a year, unexpectedly vs. what your projections expected.
If, of course, the body is a dynamic process that reacts to what it encounters in the world, then of course the dynamic reaction is what dominates the situation, not percentages of error in calorie counting.
(The way the nutritionists managed to turn "The body reacts dynamically to incoming input" into unthinkable heresy in favor of a model in which the body is essentially modeled as a hapless passive recipient of "calories" with no feedback loop will someday be seen right up there with pholostigon theory, except less excusable. Any time you speak of a bodily process and aren't thinking about the feedback loops, you've bounded your best-case outcome to "utter failure" before taking the first step.)
For weight, it's always calories in vs calories out.
Scientifically sound food recommendations [1] accept that different types of calories make you feel more or less full.
If you supplied your entire day's calories in sugar, you'd be insanely hungry.
While short-term weight loss studies from the 90s focus on calorie counts, modern studies take a longer term view and examine how well weight is maintained based on diet.
This is where the type of calorie becomes important for most people in weight regulation. (vitamins etc are another topic)
It works exactly the same for me. I approximately know how much calories I should eat during the day and if I keep below it I slowly but steadily lose weight. It does not even matter what I eat, as long as I stay below the threshold I will lose weight.
At the moment though I am gaining weight. My life is stressful at the moment and one way of dealing with this is eating tons of food. Because of this I gained about 10 kg during the last year.
I still don't see this as an argument against calorie counting. When I over eat I know that I'm getting more calories than I need. It doesn't matter if the stem of the plant I eat is harder or easier to digest when the average calories consumed is higher than the average calories needed to lose or maintain weight. I really wish people would just admit as much and not fight in the margins for a completely wrong theory.
> Proteins may require as much as five times more energy to digest as fats because our enzymes must unravel the tightly wound strings of amino acids from which proteins are built. Yet food labels do not account for this expenditure.
That's not quite true. Protein has 5 calories per gram, but labels only count 4 because of this fact.
> That's not quite true. Protein has 5 calories per gram, but labels only count 4 because of this fact.
Can you give me more information about this? I've always wondered whether or not calories listed are "net" calories (as in the number of calories you get after you extract calories from the food) or "total" (as in this amount minus the amount it takes to extract these calories). I'm just not sure what to google to read more :)
Isn't this sorta obvious? I always assumed the calorie counts in foods were old data, calculated a century ago, and the foods labeled with those counts have been so modified since then that they are little more than relative guesses useful for moderate comparison only. Add in the variances of how different people digest, as well as how food combining impacts digestion, and those counts are marginally useful at best. "Calorie" in foods have little to nothing to do with "calorie" in chemistry and physics, other than they were originally intended to be the same, but any thinking individual directing attention to them sees they are not.
I truly believe that calorie counting is just a big waste of time. sure you can pin point all the macros your eating, but unless your training for a competition or are a pro bodybuilder, than I believe just eating healthy and eating a lot each day would help you gain muscle. some good information on proper dieting is on this website I recently check out called http://bodyweightburnreviews.com/ See for yourself If your interested...
Despite the fights breaking out over accuracy I still found this article insightful. Eating 170 calories worth of broccoli vs 170 calories of honey does have a strong difference. I'm sure you can still loose weight by counting calories and adding a little exercise, even if you're adding honey to your diet. But this article at least explains why you will progress better by eating stuff that is a lot less processed.
I heard some of this already 30 years ago when I took classes in Nutritional Chemistry. It's a highly complex system which is hard to measure and often highly dependent on the individual. Today we know more about the gut organisms which helps explain some of the variability, but like the brain much of what we think we know is still speculation and often anecdotal.
Plus the yuck factor makes experimentation not much fun.
Of course, you have to keep in mind the form those calories are coming in. Fats, though energy dense, are pretty much slow release. Fructose, on the other hand, is just nasty stuff that leads to a build-up of visceral fat. Both of them contribute to your calorie count, but they both affect your body in very different ways.
How does the "eat less is simple" crowd rectify with the information seen in this same space that gut flora can be the true difference between obesity and airbrush candidacy?
Corn has to be pretty processed before it becomes edible -- cornmeal, corn mash, corn mush, corn cakes, corn flour -- all of these are highly processed versions of corn. But simply grilling corn on the cob? You'll see where most of your calories are going when you flush!
This article takes up a common position that calories are "wrong" because, due to our bodies' complex natures, such an arbitrary measure ignores a lot of what is going on. And yet, every time this view is expounded, someone comes up to calories' defense, saying that they are a reliable measure of nutritional energy. So which one is right?
While it is true that calories don't measure the nutritional energy absorbed in any single meal, that would be a trivial proposition. Calories are a statistic, that is, an estimate of an unknown but posited number, and partial representation of an underlying distribution. Saying that calories are "wrong" in this sense would be merely stating that they are possibly wrong. And they would be wrong, if the underlying processes are somehow consistently correlated with each other, which would produce inconsistent and biased estimates of caloric content.
Yet, I don't have any reason to believe that the probability that I buy some potato cultivar today is correlated with the composition of my gut flora three weeks in the future, much less that it would be consistently so. On the contrary, the factors supposedly affecting my nutrition according to biologists are so many, and so diverse, that I might as well appeal to the central limit theorem, in which case calories would be just as a good measure as we can have. If today some potato gives me 166 kcal, and tomorrow 158, and further on 163... I don't see what's the issue. The likelihood of a critical event, such as starvation, due to misreporting of calories or due to some feature of my constitution seems so low that I would only very likely trigger it if I ate nothing but one type of food, in the same quantities, for a long period of time.
Furthermore I will never understand those who prefer no measures to at least one rough measure. No things are created perfect, but only made better. I wonder would have happened it occurred to Eratosthenes that his measure would have been too rough, too imprecise, or too vague for his mind. If all ancient mathematicians were bothered that no "real" triangles were to be found anywhere, mathematics wouldn't have happened at all. By such strict understanding of measure and precision, of course measures fail. They couldn't possibly live up to it. An other example is personality theory, which is said to have been nearly abandoned at it's inception because some psychologists thought of it entirely in terms of archetypes, rather than a general description of probable behavior.
And lastly, if calories have been adequately defended here, then I'll also add that ogling at them in order to find what is wrong with nutrition theory seems completely wrong. We already know about calories, and they are a measure of what we know. Rather than looking at them, we should be looking at the measure of our ignorance, which is the error term. If some calories consistently fail to account for some observations, then it's because no one has looked inside the black box enough to figure out what is going on.
In short, it's a sensational headline. The only people who perhaps should be worrying if calories are "wrong" in the sense of not being accurate to the tenth decimal are Soylent-ers.
[+] [-] randlet|10 years ago|reply
If you want to lose weight reliably, track your weight and your caloric intake consistently. If you aren't losing weight, adjust your caloric intake until you are losing weight at a steady ~1-2lb per week.
Losing weight is simple...it's not easy, but it's very simple.
edit: You also should continually track this because as you lose weight, your body uses less energy and your maintenance level goes down meaning you may need to adjust your calories down a bit to compensate.
[+] [-] dionidium|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graeme|10 years ago|reply
None of the long term fit people I know count calories. They tend to do a couple things:
1. Have well functioning hunger, which comes from 2. Eating whole foods and 3. Eating high satiety foods
I'm pretty steadily at my lean weight. But when I'm not, I just switch to higher satiety foods and the weight comes off.
This method is both easy and simple, but I rarely see it recommended. Are there people it doesn't work for?
(Of course, the hard part of this method is having a personal dietary culture that includes buying, cooking and eating whole foods.
Note that I'm not including cost, because in areas that aren't good deserts whole foods tend to cost less than processed foods)
[+] [-] jaequery|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DannyBee|10 years ago|reply
Pretty basic math tells you even a very small percent wrong (1-2) would affect weight gain/loss over the course of a year :)
I'm also not sure what you mean by "consistency". You say " If you aren't losing weight, adjust your caloric intake until you are losing weight at a steady ~1-2lb per week."
How can you adjust your caloric intake if you don't know the real numbers? I guess you are assuming you eat literally the same thing every week, and drop stuff on the floor until you have a set of foods you know make you lose weight, and then only eat that for the rest of your life? That seems a bad strategy to keep weight off. Most people would probably be willing to eat less of something (which they sanely could if they knew the real calorie counts), but probably not change their entire diet and keep it steady forever.
Even if you just reduce the number of calories to try to account for all the inaccuracies, you are still in a situation where you actually have no idea what you can or can't eat. IE i you say "well, 1500 calories a day didn't work, i'll try 1000", in practice, some days you will have eaten 1500, some days, 900. Your claim this will just average out magically is patently false (it only averages out over time if the numbers are less than a certain percentage away from right, and that percent is very small).
If you are eating different combinations of things, the likelihood you will ever find which are wrong/right, so you know to eat less/more of it, seems really slim. You still have zero idea what you can eat for real, and you'll still find if you swap what foods you eat, you may start gaining/losing weight. So "consistency" or whatever you want to call it, doesn't make any sense.
Now, i'll grant there may be no other way to accomplish your goal right now, but suggesting this is a good method is wrong. It's a horrible method. This is like trying to optimize a multivariable constraint problem through random guessing.
[+] [-] rancur|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] acjohnson55|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjensen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmaynard|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nothis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|10 years ago|reply
If, of course, the body is a dynamic process that reacts to what it encounters in the world, then of course the dynamic reaction is what dominates the situation, not percentages of error in calorie counting.
(The way the nutritionists managed to turn "The body reacts dynamically to incoming input" into unthinkable heresy in favor of a model in which the body is essentially modeled as a hapless passive recipient of "calories" with no feedback loop will someday be seen right up there with pholostigon theory, except less excusable. Any time you speak of a bodily process and aren't thinking about the feedback loops, you've bounded your best-case outcome to "utter failure" before taking the first step.)
[+] [-] abandonliberty|10 years ago|reply
Scientifically sound food recommendations [1] accept that different types of calories make you feel more or less full.
If you supplied your entire day's calories in sugar, you'd be insanely hungry.
While short-term weight loss studies from the 90s focus on calorie counts, modern studies take a longer term view and examine how well weight is maintained based on diet.
This is where the type of calorie becomes important for most people in weight regulation. (vitamins etc are another topic)
[1] http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-p...
[+] [-] yoodenvranx|10 years ago|reply
At the moment though I am gaining weight. My life is stressful at the moment and one way of dealing with this is eating tons of food. Because of this I gained about 10 kg during the last year.
[+] [-] norea-armozel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iopq|10 years ago|reply
That's not quite true. Protein has 5 calories per gram, but labels only count 4 because of this fact.
[+] [-] wdewind|10 years ago|reply
Can you give me more information about this? I've always wondered whether or not calories listed are "net" calories (as in the number of calories you get after you extract calories from the food) or "total" (as in this amount minus the amount it takes to extract these calories). I'm just not sure what to google to read more :)
[+] [-] bsenftner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnnyboy32|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matthewrhoden1|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|10 years ago|reply
Plus the yuck factor makes experimentation not much fun.
[+] [-] talideon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TurboHaskal|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noobie|10 years ago|reply
0.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3892434/
[+] [-] MikeTLive|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mithaldu|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callesgg|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magic_beans|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpeo|10 years ago|reply
While it is true that calories don't measure the nutritional energy absorbed in any single meal, that would be a trivial proposition. Calories are a statistic, that is, an estimate of an unknown but posited number, and partial representation of an underlying distribution. Saying that calories are "wrong" in this sense would be merely stating that they are possibly wrong. And they would be wrong, if the underlying processes are somehow consistently correlated with each other, which would produce inconsistent and biased estimates of caloric content.
Yet, I don't have any reason to believe that the probability that I buy some potato cultivar today is correlated with the composition of my gut flora three weeks in the future, much less that it would be consistently so. On the contrary, the factors supposedly affecting my nutrition according to biologists are so many, and so diverse, that I might as well appeal to the central limit theorem, in which case calories would be just as a good measure as we can have. If today some potato gives me 166 kcal, and tomorrow 158, and further on 163... I don't see what's the issue. The likelihood of a critical event, such as starvation, due to misreporting of calories or due to some feature of my constitution seems so low that I would only very likely trigger it if I ate nothing but one type of food, in the same quantities, for a long period of time.
Furthermore I will never understand those who prefer no measures to at least one rough measure. No things are created perfect, but only made better. I wonder would have happened it occurred to Eratosthenes that his measure would have been too rough, too imprecise, or too vague for his mind. If all ancient mathematicians were bothered that no "real" triangles were to be found anywhere, mathematics wouldn't have happened at all. By such strict understanding of measure and precision, of course measures fail. They couldn't possibly live up to it. An other example is personality theory, which is said to have been nearly abandoned at it's inception because some psychologists thought of it entirely in terms of archetypes, rather than a general description of probable behavior.
And lastly, if calories have been adequately defended here, then I'll also add that ogling at them in order to find what is wrong with nutrition theory seems completely wrong. We already know about calories, and they are a measure of what we know. Rather than looking at them, we should be looking at the measure of our ignorance, which is the error term. If some calories consistently fail to account for some observations, then it's because no one has looked inside the black box enough to figure out what is going on.
In short, it's a sensational headline. The only people who perhaps should be worrying if calories are "wrong" in the sense of not being accurate to the tenth decimal are Soylent-ers.