Losing It: When a Calorie Isn’t A Calorie

with me as a snack. I've just asked her if we could do a little experiment to figure out how many calories are in my almonds A half one, because that might be too small where I can be cut it. Calories are everywhere. They're listed on the packaging of your favorite junk food and on the menus at chain restaurants. Apps like my fitness Pal and new exists mainly to track exactly how many calories you eat each day. There are numbers that a lot of us spend a lot

of time considering. I know I do. A banana has about a hundred calories. A slice of bacon, haste, if you can eat just one. These numbers are treated like gospel, But have you ever stopped to think where do they come from? Figuring that out is what brought me here to this U. S. D A lab. This was the start of a journey into the world of diets, where I quit clely learned that a lot of the things we think of as fact are a lot more complicated,

including the calorie. But first, back to our little science experiment with Teresa. She's about to explode my almond literally to figure out how many calories are in it. A little chap. Teresa is chopping up my almond to prepare it for a machine called a bomb calorimeter. It's this big, boxy gray thing about the size of a printer. Put my two thirds of an almond in there, and it weighs. Teresa puts the almond in a small, shallow tray called

a combustion capsule. The tray gets connected to a fuse wire and the whole thing is lowered into a metal container inside the machine. This is the bomb part of bomb calorimeter. The bomb is surrounded by water. The water is going to heat up, and however hot it gets will tell us how many calories my almond has. And now it's starting so it's equilibrating and going through its process. For a few minutes, it's quiet. All I can hear

is a low hump. The beeping means an electric current is going to pass through the fuse wire and explode my snack. You might expect blowing up an almond to make a big bang, noise or something, but it actually doesn't. It should be. We'll find out if it worked correctly, the almond would be gone. Ah, temperature is going up. That's a good sign. But what does blowing up my almond have to do with calories? So it's just basically, if you throw a log of wood on a fire,

it's going to burn and give off heat. Right, it's the same concept. You're throwing, you know, a measured amount of food or whatever and burning it, and it's going to give off heat, and you're measuring the amount of fuel energy in that food bomb. Calorimeter prints out a little white paper that looks like a receipt. Teresa tears it off and reads the result. My single almond contains about seven calories. She opens up the machine. There's nothing left but a few black smudges. You can see that

almond burnt very nicely, my snack is gone. But don't write that number in your food log just yet. Calories are way more complicated than our little experiment might suggest. I'm going to get into that soon. First, let's start with a more basic question. What is a calorie anyway? And where do the calorie counts on foods come from? What's the calorie? Calorie? Is something that makes it belly fat? How they figure it out? I don't know. You just read the can and that's how much calories is in

the food? I have no clue. I used to think that there was a method where they I don't. I don't know. I could only guess. Calories represent how much energy there is in food. Energy your body then uses to do all the things it does in a day. I think of it like fuel in a car's gas tank. Calories power your walk to the off this, cooking dinner when you get home, even reading your kids a bedtime story. Wow, the only thing I like. I'll X I'll google it.

How many calories is in one egg? How many calories isn't one slice of turkey? Vegans? These are the voices of some nice strangers who we interviewed while they were shopping at a Whole Foods in Brooklyn, and there are pretty good representation of well all of us. Everyone's at least heard of a calorie, and for many of us, they actually play a pretty big role in our decisions

about food. Calories have this incredible power over us. We're obsessed with calories because we're obsessed with being thin, but most of us have no idea what a calorie really is or how they're calculated. And here's the thing. People like to say a calorie is a calorie, but the calorie isn't actually that straightforward. The number of calories in a food can change depending on how we prepare it and who's eating it. Calorie counts on foods can even

sometimes be wrong, like our almond from earlier. Scientists are still to this day figuring out the best way to measure how much energy the food that we eat has. It's not just calories. Calories are the start of everything. We still don't know about gaining and losing weight and

what weight has to do with being healthy anyway. But that hasn't stopped people from telling you exactly how to finally drop that last ten pounds or bragging that they still fit into their high school genes or doctors from telling you to lose weight. It also hasn't sat people from making tons of money off of totally unscientific advice. I'm am a court healthcare reporter for Bloomberg News. This

is Losing It a podcast from Prognosis. We've been trained to think of dieting as a weight loss solution, but a lot of the science actually suggests the opposite. Dieting may work in the beginning to bring that number down on the scale, but as the weeks and months turn into years, the reality is that people usually don't keep the weight off. This series is about how and why we've been going about weight loss all wrong, and whether we should even be trying to lose weight in the

first place. I'm also going to look for a better solution for us away out of this whole mess. But first, let's talk some more about the humble calorie. Let's go back in time to when the calorie as we know it was born. Calories got popularized in the late nineteenth century by a guy named Wilbur olin Atwater. Wilbur was a chemistry professor at Wesleyan University who also worked for the U S d A. He's actually considered the father

of nutritional science in the US. Years earlier, European scientists had come up with the idea of using calories to measure energy. Remember, calories are a unit of energy. Scientists began using them to talk about heat powering machines like steam engines. Later they started measuring calories in food. Wilbur was drawn to this new way of thinking and got really serious about figuring out how much energy was in different foods. Wilbur was also worried about people over eating.

He wanted to know how much food people really needed. The calorie looked like a great way to do just that, so he tries to get the word out. He also came up with a formula for calculating the caloric value of food based on how much of it is fat, protein, and carbohydrates. That's actually how most calorie counts on foods get calculated today. The bond calorimeter we used earlier to blow up my almond is a more old school method.

The calorie is an attractive measure because it is a simplified number in which you can sort of put in front of an item of food. This is Giles Yo scientist with the University of Cambridge, and people think the higher the number the worst of food. In very but simplistically, in the environment, the lower number the better, the food, healthier it is for you. But that is not true. Giles is not a fan of the calorie. He actually wrote a book with a pretty blunt title, why Calories

Don't Count. And about a decade ago, scientists at the U s d A also start asking big fundamental questions about calories. Their names were David Bear and Janet Navatni, and they became interested in nuts, specifically. Yes, we're going to talk more about nuts in this episode. Anyway, they noticed that in some studies where people were fed nuts, their bodies weren't fully breaking the nuts down. That's the

politest way of putting in. What we started to think about was if the fat isn't being completely digested this is David, and it's coming out in the waste and the faces, then the calories from the fat aren't being completely absorbed as well. And it made us wonder whether we were getting accurate calorie values for tree nuts. So David and Janet put this theory to the test. They did a series of studies looking at almonds, pistachios, cashews, and walnuts, and it turned out their hunch was right.

The typical calorie counts the numbers listed on labels at food stores were too high for those nuts. The fat, the stuff that makes nuts so high calorie, wasn't being fully digested. The scientists were able to see this right in people's poop, and like David said, if people weren't digesting all that fat, they also weren't absorbing the calories

from that fat. The nuts turned out to have anywhere between five and fewer calories than their nutrition label set, and the nuts with the biggest difference almonds, like the one we blew up in the lab. Nuts, like all plant material, have a cell wall, and that's where we find the fiber that's also resistant to digestion. We can ferment it and break it down, but plant cells are surrounded by the cell wall, and until you can open up that cell wall, you can't get to what's inside

the plant cell. In the case of nuts, they're relatively high in fat, so there's a lot of energy stored within those cells. With whole nuts, that means unless you're a really thorough chew er, you're probably pooping a lot of fat out and that means fewer calories. So in short, nutritional labels have been telling us for years that a bunch of different kinds of nuts are more caloric than they actually are, and that could be the case for other food too. We've been trained to take calorie counts

on food incredibly seriously. We count our calories so we don't eat too many. We we food to make sure we're counting exactly how many calories were eating, or we buy prepackaged food because those numbers seem like they're more accurate. But as I dug into this all of that, it started to seem like a giant waste of time and effort. Wilbolan Atwater intended calories to be a tool for making

better decisions about how to fuel ourselves. Instead, we've wound up in this world where somehow a hundred calories of nuts seems equivalent to a hundred calorie pack of chips. We're focusing on the number over the quality of food, and we're also focusing on the number way too much. We've taken it way too far. Somewhere along the way, calories went from a guide to navigating food to some sort of holy infallible thing, and in the process they've

also kind of become misinformation. These issues with calories go way beyond nuts. Processing food, including by cooking, it also changes the amount of calories we get from it. Why well, For one, digestion is work and how hard you are working affects the end calorie count of a food. Processing or cooking food makes for less work for your body. Is it a carrot, Is it a steak? Is it

a donut? That our body has to look to differing degrees hard or not as hard to extract the calories, and this cost energy And so therefore you have to take this into account when you're try and account the calories within the food. It's your body has to work a hell of a lot harder to put out calories from a carrot than it needs to from a donut. The calories and a food can even depend on who is eating it. If you and I ate the same sandwich,

we might get different amounts of energy from it. That has to do with how different bodies processed food differently because of genetics and factors like the gut microbiome. So even though nutrition labels make it seem like calories are a fixed value. They actually aren't. Calorie counts on food are misleading at best, and food companies are playing their own games. Okay, so a serving as q cups, which

is decent. It's there's there's of it allegedly seven servings in this spect a hundred and forty calories per serving and seventy for a cup. Okay, So is this food good or bad for you? I have no idea. That was me and the editor of this podcast, Christin V. Brown. We're back at that Whole Foods in Brooklyn where we interviewed people about calories. We wanted to check out calor counts in the wild to get a sense of how

helpful this tool for evaluating food really is. One of the things we looked at was a bag of Musely, a quarter cop as a hundred and forty calories. You know, Musely, the breakfast cereal that's kind of like granola. So that's the same as our thirteen potato chips and our popcorn? Right? Yeah? Why is a hundred and forty the magic number? Most foods we looked at were around hundred and forty calories per serving and hundred and forty doesn't sound like that

many calories. Feel like everything has had the same amount of calori. See also a hundred and sixty is anyone going to a serving size with more than two hundred calories? According to the Food and Drug Administration, a serving size isn't a recommendation, it's actually how much people usually eat or drink that product. So when you see thirteen potato chips is a serving size that's supposed to be how many potato chips people eat in a sitting. Potato chips, Yeah, right.

And don't even get me started on how many servings are in a container. Often you buy something small that's obviously meant to be a single serving, and yet somehow the label claims it's two or three or even four servings. The more servings in a container, the fewer calories companies have to list on the label, and the better it looks when you compare it to another food. You're just relying on calories. You would say, okay, I could have popcorn for breakfast, or I could add usely and it

would be the same amount of calories. And so why should I choose the thing that seems kind of gross and healthy? Our field trip to whole Foods left me wondering are calories fundamentally broken. I'm pretty much leaning yes at this point, but many of the experts I spoke with said they're working to improve calorie counts, not get rid of them. Here's their argument. Sure, calories aren't perfect,

but they're essentially accurate, if not precisely. So they give you a number you can compare with other foods, and that can help you decide whether to have, say a pizza, or a big salad for dinner. Here's Rachel Carmody, an assistant professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, saying, you know, these food labels have been horribly wrong, and we're just going to now revamp them all, which could lead to a lot of confusion. So I think this

has to be done responsibly. We're trying to make the tool more useful. The problem with this, though, is that we all know the salad is the healthier choice for dinner, not pizza. Sadly, people still use calorie counts to make decisions about what they buy and what they eat. We want to believe the calorie is this highly accurate measure, down to a single calorie or two food labels lead us to believe the same, but calories really shouldn't be

used like that. Calories give us the illusion of control over diet and weight, but it's just that an illusion. Giles Yo, the University of Cambridge researcher, who is anti calorie, says it would be better instead to communicate a few key measures of nutritional value, specifically the amount of fiber, protein added, sugar and fat in the food. My argument is to move away from the calorie per se, but actually to consider the quality of the food, and I

think that is far more important. Now. It happens to be related to the calorie, but the calorie is a blunt tool in terms of trying to measure the quality of a of any given food you're trying to eat. When Giles talks about high quality foods, he means those that have more protein and fiber, like beans or chicken nuts count two. His point is a good one. Calories can be deceptive. A can of coca cola and a pint of strawberries both have similar numbers of calories, but

they definitely do not have similar nutritional values. It's easy, though, to think that low calorie means healthy. We talk about weight loss in the same way too, Like anyone who goes on a diet and loses fifteen pounds is going to be in better shape. But if I went on an all coca cola diet and lost weight, would I be healthier? That's why we shouldn't make weight loss equivalent with good health. Something will get into leader in the series.

We also now know that calorie counts on labels don't actually tell us how many calories of food has because how you prepare food and how you digest it and a lot of other things can change the number. And yet calories are still being treated as the truth. There are labels as fact when they probably need at least an asterisk. Diets are being sold to people based on the science behind these numbers. That's a global industry worth

a hundred and ninety two billion dollars a year. And people are relying on calories deciding whether they buy or eat food because of them. They're meticulously counting them, measuring their foods to make sure that no calorie goes unaccounted for. The crucial moment for me was when you know, we had a holiday event at work and I didn't like my photos I didn't like it, and I was like, I really have to make change for myself because I didn't like the way. You know, I look, this is

Danny Cologne. She's talking about photos from a Christmas luncheon her company through in two thousand and six. I thought myself on the thicker side and you know, I have my little double chin, and I didn't like it. It was just like, I don't like seeing myself like that. I had never gotten to that that point before, and that was the turning point for me. Deeany says she first started battling the scale about twenty years ago after having her second child. She's now forty three and a

mother of five. I was never a big girl, but I had gained a little bit and I was always trying to lose it, you know what I mean. And as when I had my third child, so that was a little bit. You know, then it just starts adding up and you're trying. But it's you know, as the older you get, the harder it is. Plus I was a full time employee, plus I was at home. I had to a sense to the kids and for me to the thought of even having to make two wheels as in a diet meal for herself and another meal

for her family was very very hard on me. So it was just something that was always on the back burner. At the time, Danny was working as a project coordinator in Tampa, Florida. She now lives in Puerto Rico. You want to get on this weight lost journey, but there's so much out there an aesthetic. I need my carbs, so it was very hard to reay, be like, I can't just eat need the vegetables, and it's hard to

cut out a whole book group. So to take out that completely, Yeah, that wasn't gonna work for my household. Danny tries out a couple of different programs. Some even helped her lose weight, but they all had some kind of downside. The costs, in particular, were an obstacle for her. One program cost five dollars just to sign up. I mean, every time you go to a weight loss program, you're paying money. And I was like, Okay, maybe I'm ready.

Now I got the tools that I need, and maybe i'll I can do this on my own and I don't have to invest in that money. Danny knew from her previous experiences with weight loss programs that tracking the food she eats really helps, so she starts calorie counting with the help of some free online tools. There are all these random calculators out there that you can use to decide how many calories to eat based on how

much weight you want to lose. Danny uses one and decides she needs to eat less than calories a day. This time, the diet starts working almost immediately. She loses twelve pounds in twelve weeks. The program is simple, eat less and move more. It's free, and Danny can see the results. I'm like more of a harder to lose weight.

Maybe I have a flower metabolism. But once I started seeing that my clothes was, you know, sitting a little bit more loose, and I started getting on the scale and the numbers were going little by little, I was like very, very motivated, and to think, oh my gosh, I'm being successful was just amazing. So it just makes you strive for more. Danny is currently allowing herself about twelve hundred calories each day. That's pretty low. A woman

her age really needs around two thousand calories. But for what it's worth, government guidelines say most women can safely lose weight eating twelve hundred to fift hundred calories a day. Danny uses this app called lose It, which keeps track of her calorie budget. If she has a hundred calorie cup of plane Cheerios, then she has eleven hundred left easy. She also likes the flexibility. The good thing about calor a counting is that you're not excluding any food groups

at all. Like let's say that Danny plans on having salmon and potatoes for lunch, but it doesn't end up happening. You just stand. You just put in your app. You know, hey, I had a pizza, cheese, whatever, and that's it. Other diets are more rigid. In other words, that's the good thing about it is like people don't have to over stress on oh my god, I've failed because I had

a slice of pizza. You can have your slice of pizza, just you know that you wake this much amount of kellys on that pizza, so have a smaller amount for your dinner. Danny loses weight calorie counting until she doesn't. It's hard to keep it up. Life happens. Her mom gets sick and Danny travels to see her in the hospital, where she's stressed and sad, and there's a lot of fast food. One time, I want to be donald thinking, Okay, what's the healthiest thing on the menu, And I thought, oh,

chicken nuggets. That's what I thought. Chicken nugget, chicken nuggets of fries and you know so of diet soa, and I thought that was the healthiest staying on the menu at the moment because I'm looking at Okay, it's not for it, it's not a burger. Let me just seek a couple of nuggets. No, it was like a thousand four until it. I was like most people have this experience. Losing weight works until it doesn't. Several studies have shown that many dieters will regain most or even all of

their lost weight. In some cases, they'll even gain more weight. Between her mom's health issues and travel, Danie isn't calorie counting as much. She ends up gaining back the weight she lost. But Deanie is trying to calorie count again and it's still a big fan of the approach. She helps manage a Facebook group We're about twenty three thousand people gathered to ask questions and trade tips. When her daughter gained some weight, after having her first child, Danny

recommended calorie counting. Her daughter lost nearly twenty pounds in a few months. When we talk, Danny runs me through the caloric value of precisely everything she has eaten that day. So today I haven't had lunch yet, so but this morning I did have coffee. I had a Starbucks pumpkin pie creamer and that was for a two hours. It's a lot, but I'm gonna invite it a little bit, a little. And then I had the rest was in coffee, So coffee zero calories. So just on my coffee alone,

I had a hundred because of the creamer. It's mostly the coin, it's all there. And then I had a little bit stody like a little cookie study and that set that was a hundred and thirty cows, So I just counted a hundred dark We're on a zoom call so I can actually see Danny's app and then right here on the very top it shows it shows you my actual budget and what I had, and it's subtracted. So for the rest of the day, I have nine.

I asked Danny about the studies that have found calori accounts may not be so accurate she doesn't seem too concerned. Even if the numbers aren't exactly right. The scale tells the truth at the end of the day. She also tells me that since her mother's illness and all that travel, she hasn't been as consistent with calorie counting as she would like. She's a little mad at herself about it, but she's more resolute than ever to stick to her

calorie goals and to lose more weight. I started getting back on track, but then there was days work, So I would track for about a week consistently, and then mess up and then just and then try again, and then just mess up and then try again. It's just it's that since that point over, um, it's kind of really hard for me to like consistently keep it up.

And the stakes are higher now. I just found out that I have diabetes and it's in the starting stages and high clipso and so I'm I've really started taking the seriously. To me, it felt like Danny had been misled by calories and weight loss in general. She'd used calorie counting to lose twelve pounds several years ago, but it hadn't been working very well for her since she called calorie counting flexible, but it didn't really seem to

accommodate her actual life. Again, She's trying to eat twelve dred calories a day, which is very restrictive. Danny likes the precision that calorie counting seems to offer, but a very precise method that's hard to stick to isn't very precise at the end of the day. And Danny didn't blame the system or even calories for the problems she'd had.

She blamed herself. So I'm thinking to myself, I really have to start when I'm supposed to lose the weight, to start feeling better and manage my health as best psyche. And I know a lot of it has to do with my insects. I'm not eating the white things. I'm not want to feel good. Danny's story isn't unique. It isn't even a modern story. Really, people have been marketing super restrictive and even silly weight loss plans for a

long time. I mean that the classic story is that until the late nineteenth century, if you were a little bit plump, it was probably a sign a that you were healthy because you had an of to eat and be you were successful because you had enough to eat, and that just begins to drop off and the fashion begins to emphasize slenderness. Dieting in the truly modern sense didn't take off until the nineteenth century or around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and the real start of

diet history begins even further back than that. From chewing your food a jillion times like Nancy Reagan to Keto and scamm me weight loss pills, It turns out that diet history definitely repeats itself. So Janette says that after taking apple side of vinegar she felt less blown because before and after on her and Michelle says she saw a major improvement in her energy throughout the day. Fun fact, the poet Lord Byron was super into vinegar as a

weight loss strategy too. Next time, on Losing It, we take a trip back into time through diet history. First stop Renaissance Italy. My physicians declared there was but one remedy left for my eels. That remedy was the temperate and orderly life. Losing It is written and reported by me Emma Court and edited by Kristin V. Brown. Magnus Hendrickson is our senior producer Stacy Wong our associate producer,

and Blake Maples is our audio engineer. Our theme was composed and performed by Hannis Brown thanks to Francesco Leavie and Tim Anette. Be sure to subscribe to Prognosis if you haven't already, and if you like our show, please leave us a review that helps others find out about it. Thanks for listening, See you next time.