"The Death Of the Calorie"
This is a long but interesting read for non science types. The title is misleading. The basic premise is, that the way we have been counting calories is a gross over simplification of the huge number of variables that exist, and a key reason many who count calories often fail to respond as they expected. It's not the death of the calorie, but perhaps a rebirth of how we go about counting calories and there's no changes to the basic calories in/calories out reality of weight loss or gain, just the reality it's FAR more complex than the basic 4/4/9 figures most, including medical/nutritional professionals who should know better, still work with... It's also why the basic advice given, which is to start at X calories, then tweak until the desired effect takes place, is given and still the best approach. This is not new per se to those who read the data and or have worked with many a client on their diets over the decades, but it's an important article for those who want to get a handle on just how complex this topic is:
"The calorie is ubiquitous in daily life. It takes top billing on the information label of most packaged food and drinks. Ever more restaurants list the number of calories in each dish on their menus. Counting the calories we expend has become just as standard. Gym equipment, fitness devices around our wrists, even our phones tell us how many calories we have supposedly burned in a single exercise session or over the course of a day.
It wasn’t always thus. For centuries, scientists assumed that it was the mass of food consumed that was significant. In the late 16th century an Italian physician named Santorio Sanctorius invented a “weighing chair”, dangling from a giant scale, in which he sat at regular intervals to weigh himself, everything he ate and drank, and all the faeces and urine he produced. Despite 30 years of compulsive chair dangling, Sanctorius answered few of his own questions about the impact that his consumption had on his body.
Only later did the focus shift to the energy different foodstuffs contained. In the 18th century Antoine Lavoisier, a French aristocrat, worked out that burning a candle required a gas from the air – which he named oxygen – to fuel the flame and release heat and other gases. He applied the same principle to food, concluding that it fuels the body like a slow-burning fire. He built a calorimeter, a device big enough to hold a guinea pig, and measured the heat the creature generated to estimate how much energy it was producing. Unfortunately the French revolution – specifically the guillotine – cut short his thinking on the subject. But he had started something. Other scientists later constructed “bomb calori*meters” in which they burned food to measure the heat – and thus the potential energy – released from it."
Cont:
https://www.1843magazine.com/feature...of-the-calorie
