Is the calorie dead? - a podcast by Donna Psiaki Feldman MS RDN

It’s safe to say calories have hijacked our thinking about diets, nutrition and food. It took maybe half a century for that to happen. Now we operate on the belief that:







* Calories = nutrition* The fewer calories in a food the healthier the food* You have to count calories everyday* If you cut back a certain number of calories you will lose a predictable amount of weight in a set time period







These entrenched beliefs now run our food supply, based on the ASSumption that everyone spends the day adding up the calories they eat.







* Food packages all have sciency-looking Nutrition Facts panels that proclaim “calories per serving” right at the top. Which creates the incentive to monkey around with normal food to make the “calories per serving” number lower. Result: insultingly awful stuff like low fat/low sugar ice cream or “reduced fat” cheese and artificially sweetened soft drinks.* Restaurants are now obliged to post calorie counts for menu items. This is supposed to make people lose weight. Again the ASSumption being that restaurant patrons will (1) notice the numbers and (2) avoid menu items with big numbers and (3) not make up the difference later at home by eating a half gallon of ice cream.







The obsessive focus on calories started back in the early 20th Century. According to the entertaining essay “Death of the Calorie“, calorie counting took over the weight loss industry in the mid-20th Century and the rest is history. Calorie counting took on a life of its own.







Our trust in calorie counting comes from our tendency to trust anything that looks like science. Numbers create a sciency sheen, and calories are all about numbers. Therefore it must be true that if you simply cut out 3500 calories (the amount of caloric energy in one pound of fat) from your precisely known calorie requirement (sarcasm alert) over the course of a week, you’ll lose exactly one pound of fat. I doubt that that has ever happened to any dieter in the entire history of the human race.







Admittedly, my profession has been on the front lines of promoting calorie obsession from the get go. If you study nutrition, the energy value of food is a huge focus. Nutrition professionals can start to think everyone is as preoccupied with calories as they are, which results in nonsense like restaurant menu cluttered up with calorie numbers.







The essay points out some of the accuracy issues I’ve discussed in the past.







* Calories listed on a food package are not accurate. They can be off by up to 20%. And that’s only if someone checks the accuracy by analyzing the food. The number on the label could be off by more, but if no one bothers to check, the company is unlikely to recognize the problem and fix it.* As for your own daily energy (calorie) requirement, you can calculate it with one of several popular predictive equations, but none of the results will be 100% accurate. * Plus your energy needs can vary day to day depending on what you eat, the weather, your activity level and so forth. * Speaking of activity level, there is a widespread tendency to overestimate the amount of energy burned by physical activity, such as a daily 30 minute walk.* And depending on what you eat and the mix of gut microbes, you may not even absorb all the calories you consume. * Simple calorie counts do not account for the different calorie sources: carbs, protein and fat (and alcohol). All are handled differently by your metabolism.

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