Not only does an article on the Time magazine website titled “You Asked: Should I Count Calories?” never answer the titular question, it concludes with the line “The rest of us could do well by cutting the word ‘calorie’—but not calories themselves—from our mouths.”
Not only is the conclusion confusing, it is very frustrating for anyone who’s looking for healthy and sustainable ways to lose weight. Here, with a title hinting at a definitive answer to a crucial weight loss question, one of the most respected journals in the world only adds to the confusion.
But, luckily for you, you have the Herbal One blog here to help clearly answer the question.
Despite the fact that it doesn’t come to any real conclusions, the article has some very useful information. It questions the validity of counting calories based on a number of problems with doing so, including the following.
1. It’s Tough to Count Calories Accurately
The article points out that, according to the U.S. FDA, a calorie value that’s given for a serving size is only out of compliance if it is 20% or higher than the actually calorie count. That means the calories listed on the package can be around 80% of the actual calories. With that kind of leeway, processed food manufacturers can make their foods look like they deliver significantly fewer calories than they actually do.
And, as we’ve told you before, we all tend to overestimate how many calories we burn, and underestimate how many calories we consume.
2. The Term ‘Calorie’ has Become Burdened with Damaging and Incorrect Connotations
A quick example of this happens every time someone offers you something to eat and you ask, ‘how many calories does it have?’ You’re not asking how much energy is in the food, which is what your question literally means; you’re asking how ‘fattening’ the food is. ‘Calories’ have become synonymous with ‘fat’ (the unhealthy kind too) and we are encouraged to ‘cut’, ‘get rid’ and ‘burn’ them.
A calorie is in fact a unit of the energy in food. One calorie is the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of one gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. That’s it. It has nothing to do with fat except fat is where your body stores excess food energy.
3. All Calories are Not Equal
This is one place where the article gets confusing because it is simply wrong. All calories are indeed equal under the definition listed above.
The point the article is trying to make is that the energy in food, which is measured in calories, is metabolized by our bodies differently depending on the food that delivers the energy.
It seems obvious to say it, but we actually don’t consider the following when we think about the calories in food. Energy is just one component of the foods we eat. They all have other parts, including vitamins, minerals, macro nutrients, fibre and so on.
It’s the overall composition of each food we eat that can make calories seem ‘unequal’. Those other elements in the food, especially fibre, can slow down how quickly we metabolize the energy and reduce how much of it our bodies store as fat.
Here’s a quick example. A can of regular Coke has the same number of calories as two medium-sized pears. But the Coke has few other nutrients and no fibre. That means the sugar from Coke enters the blood stream fairly quickly. That fast shot of energy increases your blood sugar levels, which in turn prompts your body to produce more insulin. The insulin tells your cells to absorb the blood sugar, which they see as excess, and they store it.
But the pear has lots of other elements in it. In addition to tons of vitamins and minerals, the pear’s fibre, which the body digests slowly, slows down the release of the sugar energy into the blood stream. Insulin production is never triggered, and your body’s cells don’t store the blood sugar.
So, while all calories are equal, not all foods are equal. All the energy in one type of food can get stored by your body as fat while none of a similar amount of energy in another food might get stored as fat.
In ‘Why You Must Count Calories – Part 2’ we’ll look at why calories counting is important despite the arguments made in the article.