General

I recently heard a fascinating show on BBC radio one. The Food Program discussed and explained the idea of the calorie so well that I thought people in this community could benefit from hearing it.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnx3

The BBC only keep programs up for a limited time so listen quick before it's gone.

I've transcribed some of my favourite bits so it will be available even after the show becomes unavailable. I'll reply with these below.

I love shows like that give you a truer insight into the basis of nutritional dicta that is, as I'm finding more and more, hokum.

Governmental determination to completley irradicate obesity; is it misguided and misinformed health concern or a malicious and totalitarian scheme to impress societial homogenization?

‘When did we decide as a society that controlling calories was the essence of good eating and losing weight?’

‘That is such a great question and I’ve actually tried to find that out. I’ve asked all the government health bodies in the UK where does this calorie theory come from. The Calorie Theory is summarized by The British Dietetic Association as 1lb of fat contains 3500cals so to lose 1lb a week you need a deficit of 500cals a day. Now I tried to trace from whence that came and I couldn’t easily find it so I asked the National Health Service, the Department of Health, the British Dietetic Association who of course use it, they all use it, the National Obesity Forum, National Institute for Clinical Excellence, dieticians in obesity management and The Association for the Study of Obesity. And 5 out of the 7 basically replied back and said ‘Do you know we have no idea’ and the 2 that tried to help, the dieticians in obesity management and The Association for the Study of Obesity, neither knew from whence it came and neither could prove that it held as a formula, in fact the proved it completely and utterly wrong. Now I’ve personally traced it back to a possible origin to a book by someone called Lulu Hunt Peters called Diet and Health and it was published in America in 1918. And Hunt Peters says that 500cals is approximately 2 ounces of fat so if you cut back by 1000cals per day then you’re going to lose about 8lbs per month or 96lbs per year. Now she should have realised the nonsense of that statement at the time. I’m approximately 110lbs, the theory so goes that I should be able to cut back by 1000cals a day and weigh in at 6lbs in a year’s time. It really is as ridiculous as that.'

'We have long believed that a pound of human fat tissue equates to 3000cals and very few people know where that actually comes from and you can piece it together by taking 3 pieces of information but only one of them is actually a fact. And the 3 bits of information we need to put it together is that 1lb is 454g, which decimal places aside is a fact, then the notion that 1g is 9cals which is an approximation and then the idea that human fat tissue is 87% lipid. And the second and third are so strongly approximations that they render the whole equation futile. And yet people will repeat it, it’s in every government document, it’s in magazines on the shelves daily and people do not know where this figure comes from let alone that it simply does not hold.'

Prof. Nick Cullather
‘There was a theory circulating in Europe that the human body resembled a machine, the principles of mechanical energy that governed machines also applied to the human form. And Wilbur O. Atwater tested this [Atwater’s Calorimetry Study 1897-1903] by placing a student inside a calorimeter. The calorimeter was an air tight chamber in which the subject slept and ate and in which all of his bodily functions: the heat that he gave of, the energy he produced, the respiration, the moisture he gave off. All of it was measured so that the theory could be tested but more than that so that the actual values, the actual numerical quantitative values of calories ingested and worked off through the various tasks he did could be measured. And these series of experiments that Atwater did produced a series of tables call the Atwater tables which measure the amount of energy given off by certain tasks and also the amount of energy taken in by the body through certain foods. It was the first time that you could measure human welfare. ’

‘Was the calorie the beginnings of modern nutritionism?’

‘In a way the calorie became almost immediately detached from nutritional science. Atwater intended it as a way to put nutritional science on a solid statistical basis, to take it away from the moralist and the quacks who had been dominating it before. But almost immediately after the calorie was created scholars at Johns Hopkins University began to discover components within food called vitamins which changed the picture of what nutritional value was. And by 1920 they had codified a whole catalogue of minerals, vitamins and micro-nutrients which were essential in every diet. Within nutritional science therefore it tended to marginalize the calorie’s importance. But just as it was marginalized within nutritional science it took off in both popular culture and in governmental use.’

A calorie is an old unit of energy. It is the amount of energy required to heat up 1 mL of water with 1° Celsius. A Kcal is the amount of energy needed to heat up one liter of water with 1° C. So far the exact science.

When it comes to calories, food intake and gaining or losing weight, it is not an exact science anymore. Experiments have been done in controlled environments where people were put on high calorie diets, and it was clear that not all people gained the same amount of weight, as they should according to the theory that "calories consumed" - "calories burnt" = weight loss/gain.
It is much more complex than that and scientists have not yet been able to understand all of it.