The most common formula for weight loss is simply: calories consumed minus calories burned.
However, if you belong to the more than two-thirds of American adults who are obese or overweight, you may have tried putting this formula to practice, only for you to not see any results (except maybe that you were hungrier).
As it turns out, this failure may not be your fault at all. The way we currently understand the calorie is inaccurate, and there are some ways we can proactively work to better understand what we put in our bodies and how different foods interact with our individual chemical makeup.
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First of all, the calorie measurement system that the FDA and the US Department of Agriculture still use to this day is based on data that is over a century old, completely outdated, and not suited for the current times and lifestyles that people live.
The way our food is currently labeled gives off the illusion of scientific precision, when really it’s just an educated guess, at best.
There are several reasons for calories inaccuracy, starting most obviously with fiber intake. Our bodies can’t digest some of the calories from fiber in our food, so deducting these fiber calories is the first step in adjusting your calorie measurement. For example, if a can of refried beans has 8.9 calories per gram of fat, when you eat it you are really only digesting 8.3 calories per gram because of the undigestible fiber, meaning you are actually consuming fewer calories than you might think, which is good news!
Bad news comes with portion sizing, especially in restaurants. After Tufts University’s nutrition research centre’s survey of over 40 chain restaurants, including PF Chang’s and Olive Garden, it was discovered that a dish listed as having 500 calories, for example, could really have up to 800 calories instead. These variables come from local chefs either giving an extra dollop of sauce, or an additional heaping of French fries, which makes calorie counting in this fashion pretty much impossible.
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Then there are our individual physiologies to consider. Each person has a different chemical makeup, and some people actually digest far fewer calories than they consume, meaning they eliminate many of the extra empty calories that their body cannot digest. This variable is inconsistent from person to person, meaning that each person has a different rate of caloric digestion. This is also the same for the constitution of the food we are eating. Take almonds, for example. It has been found that nearly 21% of the calories listed on the label of almonds were actually not digested by the human digestion system because,
All the nutrients – the fat and the protein and things like that – they’re inside this plant cell wall. Unless those walls are broken down – by processing, chewing or cooking – some of the calories remain off-limits to the body, and thus are excreted rather than absorbed.
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This infers that cooking food actually increases the number of calories in the same kind of food, and it has been discovered that this is actually true. When food is cooked, it unravels microscopic structures that bind energy together in foods. This job is generally done by the body during digestion. However, when the energy is broken down via cooking, this means the calories are already in a digestible, usable form (digest more calories with less work), and the body has less work to do (less calorie expenditure). For example, a steak cooked rare will have several hundred less calories than a steak that is prepared well-done. However, as far as the FDA is concerned, a steak is a steak. This is a problem.
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There has also been the accepted notion that genetics has much to do with our individual metabolic rates and obesity trends, but this is slowly losing credibility. Obesity rates skyrocketed in the 1980s, and genetics cannot change in that twenty year period, so genetics can only account for a small part of obesity rates. Instead, researchers are thinking that the composition of our gut bacteria may have more to do with weight management than we previously have ever thought. (This research also directs the conversation to how certain medications alter the makeup of our gut microbes, which can account for why certain medications are responsible for weight gain).
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The microbes in our intestines are responsible for digesting some of the tougher fibers that our stomach cannot, which means that there is an additional release of calories as the digestion process continues through the intestinal tract. The kicker is that the combination of microbes in our guts is different from person to person, and can even fluctuate throughout the day. Our microbial makeup can be likened to that of our fingerprint.
All of this research leads us to know that there is a disturbingly large margin of error in the way that we currently track and measure caloric count. Between the discrepancies in the calorie number on the label, the portion of the food, combined with the individual variations in how we metabolize said food, this can add up to a large number of unaccounted for calories that can be completely outweighing any calories you are depleting via exercise. In layman’s terms, because of the inaccuracy of the calorie measurement, you can be doing everything ‘right’, and not lose any weight.
Changing how we measure our food can transform our relationship with it for the better.
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Before we can have a healthy relationship with food, we have to understand food in a holistic, individualized manner. We must rethink our approach to eating and cooking in order to establish long-term balance.
It increasingly seems that there are significant variations in the way each one of us metabolizes food, based on the tens of thousands – perhaps millions – of chemicals that make up each of our metabolomes. This, in combination with the individuality of each person’s gut microbiome, could lead to the development of personalized dietary recommendations. Imagine a future where you could hold up your smartphone, snap a picture of a dish, and receive a verdict on how that food will affect you as well as how many calories you’ll extract from it. Your partner might receive completely different information from the same dish.
Curated article from:
Mosaic Science
