Food for thought: Ever counted calories using nutritional labels?
Well just how accurate are they anyway?
Hi guys, Julia here for DNews.
Food labels are great, they give you an estimate of how many calories are in a certain food.
But they have a bit of a flaw.
They fail to take into account how cooking affects food.
So we end up with a system that likely overestimates the calories available in unprocessed foods
and under estimates the calories in processed food.
Our current calorie counting system is based on the Atwater System, which is at least a
hundred years old.
The System standardized the idea of the amount of energy available in food, 9 calories in
a gram of fat or 4 calories in every gram of protein.
But this measures the available of energy in food, not the digestibility.
A calorie is a unit of energy.
It’s technically the amount of energy needed to heat up a kilogram of water by 1 degree
C. Our body burns calories in food through metabolizing the carbohydrates and proteins
and what not into smaller molecules our body can use as energy.
Cooking food changes how many calories are digestible.
Take potatoes for example, when raw, the sugar molecules in potatoes are too tightly packed
for our digestive system to handle.
Cooking causes the starches in the potato to gelatinize.
That process allows us to access the sugars stored in the starch, so we get MORE calories
out of the cooked potato.
On the other hand, digesting raw food takes work, a stick of celery might have 10 calories,
but the chewing and digesting burns about half of them.
All that work means there are fewer calories for your body to absorb for energy.
But before you go nibbling on an all-carrot diet, consider this: For our ancestors, cooking
food meant the difference between life and death.
The invention of a cooked meal might have changed everything.
Cooking food provided more energy and lead to human’s bigger brains and bigger babies.
And people who consume an all-raw diet now, might not be getting enough calories.
Even when eating food packed with nutrients.
Some women on an all-raw diet get irregular menstrual cycles, a sign of under-nourishment.
On top of that, the type of cooking method might change the chemistry of food as well
- whether it’s boiled, baked or microwaved.
Not to mention the bacteria in your gut steal a few of the calories for themselves.[a] So
the exact number of calories you’re getting is affected by way too many factors for those
labels to be truly accurate.
But while modifications to the Atwater system have improved it some over the years, there’s
still no real alternative.
So until nutrition scientists come up with a better calorie counting system take food
labels with a grain of salt.
See what I did there?
Switching gears for a second, I wanna let you know that tomorrow Trace, Amy and Ian
are gonna be chatting with a real live astronaut about what it’s like to live and work in
space.
And if you wanna hang out with the space nerds, be sure to RSVP using the link we’ve got
in the description.
That’s at at 3pm eastern time, noon pacific.
So do you trust nutritional labels?
Do they need to be updated?
Leave your thoughts and comments below and don’t forget to subscribe for more DNews
everyday