If you’ve ever been confused about the importance of a calorie in managing your weight you are not alone! All too many people, both health professionals and those who are not, attempt to offer their opinion. The problem is that it ends up making most people more confused rather than less. At the risk of adding to the confusion, let me attempt to explain what we know and what we don’t. Calories do matter.
Both calorie quantity and quality matter.
First of all I absolutely agree with David Katz, M.D., Director of Yale Prevention Research Center. He recently wrote and published an article in which he explained that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. I am repeating myself for effect because as he points out a gallon is a gallon, a degree of temperature is a degree, and a mile is a mile. These are precise units of measure that are unchangeable. In the same sense a calorie is ALWAYS a calorie.
As he goes on to point out, the measure we use in reference to food is actually a kilocalorie that we simply shorten to say calorie. It is nothing more than a measurement for a unit of energy.
How Calories Influence Weight Management
The real question we need to ask is how calories influence body weight and more specifically body fat. That’s the multi-million, no more likely the multi-billion dollar question, that ultimately misleads too many people. At the very least, writing about calories and weight management gets people to read what you have to say. But all too often the confusion over the importance of calories is used as a way to sell books, products, and services that promise something that isn’t true and only offers false hope.
Calories are not magical. You can’t ignore calorie counts simply because you eat certain foods. However, what is true is that YOU are unique in the way YOUR body handles the calories you consume. No two people will digest AND then absorb the same number of calories even if they eat the exact same amount of a given food. Nor do any two people burn calories with the exact same efficiency once those calories are absorbed from the digestive tract, as David Katz points out.
People who are blessed with a high metabolic rate or who have a body that is inefficient in absorbing calories consumed can eat quite a bit more than the average person and not gain weight. The rest of us are all too painfully aware that we need to pay attention to how much we eat or our clothing seems to shrink!
Why the Quality of Calories You Eat Matters
What seems to be most important is the quality of the calories you eat. No the calories in nutritious food are NOT different from the calories in low quality food. However, the kind of calories you eat influences HOW MUCH you eat, how many calories are absorbed, and how those calories are handled in your body.
It is in your best interest to eat foods that are rich in the nutrients your body needs because it has a direct effect on keeping hunger under control. This in turn helps you keep your caloric intake at an appropriate level for YOUR body. Losing weight and maintaining that loss becomes much easier.
Low quality food that is nutrient poor or a source of too much sugar, fat, and/or salt can have a negative impact on your weight precisely because it encourages you to overeat! It can also have a negative impact on how those calories are handled in your body.
When nutrients enter your blood stream after digestion and absorption, the blend of nutrients present begin an extraordinarily complex cascade of biochemical events that are unique to what you’ve eaten, how much you’ve eaten, and your personal genetic makeup. This chain of events along with your activity level influences how much of what you’ve eaten will be burned for energy versus how much is stored as fat. It can even have an influence on where the fat is stored!
The impact of caloric quality gets very complicated very quickly. I will leave that for a series of articles at another time. In the meantime, please take note of both WHAT you eat AND how much. Both matter. Calories matter. High quality calories are BEST.
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