What? Calorie is a perfectly accurate method of measurement. Just because your body might absorb more or less than the next person doesn’t change the amount of calories in a food.
Comment on Making healthier choices
eatCasserole@lemmy.world 6 months agoWe can’t even measure calories accurately, never mind predicting how much your specific body will actually absorb. Maybe we could be more accurate with vitamins and stuff, but I dunno.
FluorideMind@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Neato@ttrpg.network 6 months ago
Measuring calories in food is not accurate. Measuring calories by burning fuel is, but that’s not how we use food.
Sethayy@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Lmao so measuring calories in food isn’t accurate cause you don’t consider it food when measured?
That’s gotta be the funniest counter argument I’ve ever heard
blandfordforever@lemm.ee 6 months ago
I think he’s saying that you can measure how much energy the food contains but not how much energy each individual will successfully absorb and metabolize.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Nah, that’s the funniest attempt at dissing someone that said something you don’t understand I’ve ever seen.
Calorimeters do a specific job. That job is not the same as digestion and metabolism. Not all foods “give up” calories in the same way, and no foods do so in the same way as inside a calorimeter.
Measured calories via calorimeter are indeed accurate with exactly what they measure, i.e. The exact food that is placed into them.
What a calorimeter can’t do is guarantee that everything put into it is the same.
The more complex the substance is, the more variation there will be between measurements of different batches of that substance. Something like refined sugar is going to give the same results reliably because there’s just not that much variation. Same with refined fats and proteins. Once you get simple enough, the results vary by so little as the be meaningless.
Put two bananas in the same machine, the variance will be greater than that of simpler materials. Is that variance enough to matter on a practical level? Not usually, but it can be.
But, that variance is still there, and the range of possibilities is enough to be significant when calculating what you might slap on a nutritional level of a given food.
Hence, the results aren’t accurate in the sense that they can be reproduced in a precise way. There’s just too much natural variance in foods, even carefully prepared foods.
joyjoy@lemm.ee 6 months ago
The only way to get an accurate reading on calorie count is to burn it. 1 kilocalorie (nutritional calorie) can increase the temperature of 1kg of water by 1 C°
janNatan@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
But burning isn’t how your body utilizes the calories. Some things burn just fine yet are entirely useless as a (human) food source, like wood. This complicates things.
For instance, we still don’t know if our bodies can actually use ethanol (drinking alcohol) as a fuel source. Is that vodka shot adding to your daily calorie intake?
giantfloppycock@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Vodka’s back on the menu, boys!
TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It was off the menu?
StaticFalconar@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Even more reason there is plenty of science to be discovered. Until then, the rough estimate we have is still proven to work (calories consumed minus calories burned).
gibmiser@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Sure, but that is measuring calorie content, not what your body can absorb
eatCasserole@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Exactly, which makes the whole endeavour more of a guessing game than a science.
Mongostein@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
I think using trial and error to see what works for your body is a pretty scientific approach
ramble81@lemm.ee 6 months ago
I mean there’s no way that they’re gonna be able to do metrics for every person since every person is built differently so there has to be a common standard. Or you you saying that certain types of calories are burned the same way for all people?
gibmiser@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I’m just saying it’s not that simple.