Introduction
So I've tackled salt, time now to try some more de-bunking. This post will take a look at a keystone of the diet industry, the calorie, and more specifically counting them...
What is a Calorie?
So I've tackled salt, time now to try some more de-bunking. This post will take a look at a keystone of the diet industry, the calorie, and more specifically counting them...
Whilst there is nothing wrong with the first law of thermodynamics. Its wrong to assume that it explains everything that's going on with the human machine. As I will try and explain, the Calorie In Calorie Out (CICO) argument is an overly simplified description of the human 'machine', and as a weight loss (or muscle gain) strategy it is fundamentally flawed as it fails to account for the following:
- How Calories Are Calculated
- Your Body’s Hormone Response
- The Quality of The Calories
- Your Body Fat Setpoint
- Addiction and Dependency
- The Macronutrient Breakdown
What is a Calorie?
So lets start with a quick science lesson recap....there are two types of calorie: A small calorie (cal) is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram (g) of water by 1º Celsius (º C). A large calorie (kcal) is the amount of energy required to raise 1 kilogram (kg) of water by 1º C.
To determine calorie counts, scientists burn Food in a water-enclosed chamber called a bomb calorimeter; the number of degrees by which the burning food raises the water’s temperature equals the number of calories in the food.
What this test doesn't tell you is what nutrients are available for our bodies. For example if you put a chunk of wood in calorimeter it will tell you the wood had a great deal of energy in it. However, since all that energy is in the form of cellulose (humans can’t digest cellulose), the actual nutritional caloric content of wood is zero and this therefore is one of the main problems with using calories as a dietary metric (but there are a few more as well..)
CICO history
The Calorie is a relatively recent phenomenon and the idea of counting calories for health purposes is even newer. Between 1819 and 1824 French physicist and chemist Nicholas Clément introduced the term calories in lectures on heat engines to his Parisian students and by 1845, the word appeared in Bescherelle’s Dictionnaire National. By the 1860s the term had entered the English language which defined a Calorie as the heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water from 0 to 1°C. By the 1880s, the term was first introduced to the American public by Edward Atkinson. Professor Wilbur O. Atwater came next when he published on the calorie in 1887 in Century Magazine and again in the 1890s in Farmer’s Bulletin. From the 1890s, Atwater and his team at Wesleyan undertook a study into the caloric content of over 500 foods with the intent of producing a scientific and healthy way of maintaining one’s weight. By the early 1900s, Atwater was one of the leading authorities on dietary intake and his advice was simple. Cut out excess and ensure a balance between foods.
In 1918, American physician, author and philanthropist, Lulu Hunt Peters changed the face of dieting for the next century. Peters latched onto the idea that calorie counting was an effective means of enacting healthy weight loss and published Diet & Health: With Key to the Calories, this was her first and only book on calorie counting. Diet & Health became one of the first ‘modern’ dieting book to become a bestseller, and it remained in the top ten non-fiction bestselling books from 1922 to 1926.
The labels are wrong
Ignoring whether or not the CICO theory is sound or not for a minute, to actually count calories (and restrict them) you need to know the calorific content of the food you are eating. Guess what, even today that ain't easy! Although almost every packaged food today features calorie counts in its label most of these counts are inaccurate because they are based on a system of averages that ignores the complexity of digestion.
So we've done our experiments and now know that fats provide approximately nine calories per gram, whereas carbohydrates and proteins deliver just four. Fiber offers just two calories because enzymes in the human digestive tract have great difficulty chopping it up into smaller molecules. Every calorie count on every food label you have ever seen is based on these estimates or on modest derivations thereof. Yet these approximations assume that the 19th-century laboratory experiments on which they are based accurately reflect how much energy different people with different bodies derive from many different kinds of food. New research has revealed that this assumption is, at best, far too simplistic. To accurately calculate the total calories that someone gets out of a given food, you would have to take into account a dizzying array of factors, including whether that food has evolved to survive digestion; how boiling, baking, microwaving or flambéing a food changes its structure and chemistry; how much energy the body expends to break down different kinds of food; and the extent to which the billions of bacteria in the gut aid human digestion and, conversely, steal some calories for themselves.
Nutrition scientists are beginning to learn enough to hypothetically improve calorie labels, but digestion turns out to be such a fantastically complex and messy affair that we will probably never derive a formula for an infallible calorie count, and the reality is that even if you're extremely diligent in your measuring and recording efforts you can expect an error of approximately 350 calories per day!
Hormones
Farmers have known that there's more to growing an animal than simply providing sufficient calories. In fact they've known for over 30 years that when they give their livestock certain hormones (which can include natural and synthetic versions of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone) the animals weight increases far quicker than without. I.e. if they had two cows in the same field, which were both fed the same quantities of feed every day, but one was given extra hormones, the hormone supplementing cow would weigh significantly more than his buddy. Just think about that for a minute, they've both eaten exactly the same amount of calories, done the same amount of exercise, but have grown at significantly different rates. This fact alone shows how wrong the CICO model is and why controlling hormones is the key to controlling weight and body composition.
Like a cow, the human body is not a calculator and its functions are controlled by hormones which respond differently to different foods. Fat, carbs, and protein (macronutrients) all influence hormones in different ways. For example, non-fiber carbohydrates trigger the release of insulin where fat does not. Insulin is a hormone that pushes nutrients into cells, stabilizes blood sugar, and stores fat. It’s a vital hormone that has a unique side effect. It also has the ability to become disordered, resulting in insulin resistance and type II diabetes.
Another important hormone is Cortisol. This is a hormone released in response to stress and it’s job is to decrease and control inflammation. But, as with all other hormones, there are side effects. Balance is key. If stress is chronic and cortisol is constantly elevated, issues occur, these include insulin resistance, fat storage, and disease over the long term.
So when hormones are out of balance, the body holds on to excess fat, weight gain becomes easier, and stored nutrients can’t be utilized. When some hormones become disordered they can disorder others as well, causing additional issues. The human body is a holistic, biological system that responds to different foods with varying hormonal responses. This has a direct influence on your metabolism and it’s one of the main reasons why counting calories is pointless.
Your Body Fat Setpoint
Everyone has a body fat setpoint that tightly regulates weight loss and gain, it’s one of our many programmed defense mechanisms (drastic reduction or gain in fat mass is not considered desirable by your Hypothalamus). This is why some people who never count a single calorie maintain the same weight, their setpoint is being tightly regulated by a functional metabolism.
The setpoint is a chosen weight the hypothalamus attempts to maintain through the regulation of satiety and energy expenditure. If you eat too much, you’re subconsciously influenced to increase activity and decrease consumption at subsequent meals. The key here is that the setpoint is a moving goalpost. As you gain weight over the long term (by eating foods your body wasn’t designed to adequately deal with) the setpoint jumps from one maintenance range to a higher one (due in part to leptin resistance). Those higher levels of weight become the new normal that the body will try hard to defend, creating a vicious cycle.
Nutritional Content
One of the big issues with calorie counting is that it doesn’t include the quality of the food you are eating. It does not distinguish between an unprocessed natural food, and what composition and type of fat, protein, carbohydrate, vitamin, minerals, anti-oxidants and phyto-compounds it contains. Additionally calorie counting can encourage the avoidance of naturally high calorie foods such as nuts, seeds and avocados and these foods contain important fatty acids and fat soluble vitamins that support a healthy metabolism and a healthy weight. If you’re cutting calories and you’re deficient in micronutrients, your body will still signal constant hunger because your cells are starving for real food, therefore to maintain optimum health you should be striving to eat nutrient dense foods as opposed to the correct number of calories.
But wait, doesn't calorie restriction work?
Well yes it can, and I'm not denying that you can lose weight by counting and restricting calories, after all the first law of thermodynamics is still a law, and companies like weight watchers make gazillions of dollars marketing the idea. But hopefully I've managed to convince you that it is not a particularly effective or sustainable way to live your life. Furthermore, whilst you may be able to lose a bit of weight by restricting calories, by ignoring far more important factors such as hormone control and nutrient density you may not be improving your health.
In a classic series of studies dating to the 1980s, investigators at Rockefeller University in New York underfed volunteers to make them lose 10 to 20 percent of their weight, and then studied their metabolism during lengthy admissions to the research unit. Regardless of whether the participants had normal or high body weight at the beginning of the study, they experienced a large drop in metabolic rate , far more than could be attributed to weight change alone. And of course, underfeeding made the participants hungrier. These findings explain an experience all too familiar to anyone who has been on a diet. When you eat fewer calories, the body becomes more efficient and burns fewer calories, even as your desire for extra calories heightens. This combination of rising hunger and slowing metabolism is a recipe for failure. After a few weeks of calorie deprivation , long before your weight loss target is within sight , you become tired and tempted to quit your exercise routine, and collapse on the couch with a pint of ice cream. Even if you stick to the diet, and stay active, your metabolic rate will continue to fall, so you’ll need to cut calories even more drastically to kept losing weight. Not a sustainable lifestyle, and when you start eating normally again after a restrictive diet, chances are you'll gain more weight because your metabolism is broken and can't do its job.
So whats the take away..
The reality is that the foods we eat affect our bodies in different ways and go through different metabolic pathways.The way a human body processes food depends on many factors such as how much the food was cooked, the gut health of the individual, how the body digests the food, etc. Not only that, but the foods we eat and when we eat them can directly affect the hormones that regulate when and how much we eat, and whether or not we store the energy we eat. Therefore, the types of foods we base our diet around and our lifestyle are far more important than the amount of calories we are eating.
The key to long-term weight loss isn’t counting calories; it’s eating in a way that lowers insulin levels, calms chronic inflammation and, by so doing, readjusts the body weight set-point to a lower level. A successful and sustainable diet should promote optimum health, and when your body is functioning properly it will maintain optimum weight effortlessly, achieving your ideal body weight should be a by-product of a truly healthful diet & lifestyle rather than the priority.
If you're trying to push your body outside of its status quo in terms of %fat & muscle (accepting that this may not be a good strategy for longevity) then you may need to pay some attention to your calorie intake. If your target is all round health and longevity then ignore the calories and instead focus on nutrient density and hormonal response. See my page on basic food rules for a starter and more detail will follow in future blog posts.
