What Is a Calorie?

A degree — on any given tem­per­a­ture scale — is a degree. That doesn’t mean every degree will FEEL the same to you or me, because we are more sen­si­tive to tem­per­a­ture change in some parts of the range than oth­ers. We are unlikely to notice the dif­fer­ence, for instance, between 41 degrees below zero Fahrenheit and 42 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Both are so cold, who cares? But we might well notice the dif­fer­ence between 67 and 68 while sit­ting in an office if we hap­pen to be a bit chilly at the for­mer and com­fort­able at the lat­ter. But still, a degree is a degree.

A mile is a mile. But walk­ing one over flat ground when well-rested feels very dif­fer­ent from climb­ing one up a moun­tain when exhausted. But the dif­fer­ences have to do with our con­di­tion, ter­rain and alti­tude — not dis­tance. A mile is… a mile.

Why, then, do we keep ask­ing — as occurred in today’s New York Times — if a calo­rie is a calo­rie? Of course it is. It can be noth­ing else.

As noted above, the mea­sure we actu­ally use when talk­ing about food is the kilo­calo­rie. A kilo­calo­rie (Europeans use the kilo­joule, by the way) is the energy required to raise the tem­per­a­ture of one liter of water one degree Celsius at sea level. Does it sound as if that leaves much room for debate? It is a unit of energy, no more debat­able than a unit of dis­tance, tem­per­a­ture, vol­ume or velocity.

Why, then, is there a cot­tage indus­try in ques­tion­ing the calo­rie? And why am I so adamant that this cot­tage indus­try should be shut down? I will address these ques­tions in turn.

Questioning the calo­rie sells. It sells books, arti­cles, mag­a­zines, news­pa­pers and air time. It exploits the dif­fi­culty so many of us have with weight con­trol, and turns it into a dumbed-down pet the­ory, con­spir­acy the­ory, and/or mag­i­cal think­ing. It offers a false promise of weight loss inde­pen­dent of energy bal­ance. And since real and keep­able promises about weight loss require the actual effort involved in deal­ing with energy bal­ance, false promises peren­ni­ally appeal.

My adamant oppo­si­tion to this indus­try relates to the fact that it is harm­ful to health — pub­lic and per­sonal. The more time we spend debat­ing what should not be debat­able, the more time we spend with under­stand­ing, con­sen­sus, col­lec­tive effort and resources diverted from where they could make a mean­ing­ful and pos­i­tive dif­fer­ence. The more often we buy a new answer to the “Is a calo­rie a calo­rie?” ques­tion, the more time we spend mired in epi­demic obe­sity. Those prof­it­ing from the con­fu­sion prob­a­bly don’t mind, but you should.

“Is a calo­rie a calo­rie?” is the wrong ques­tion, obscur­ing all of the right ques­tions and divert­ing our atten­tion from what mat­ters. It also is a clas­sic exam­ple of cre­at­ing con­fu­sion rather than alle­vi­at­ing it, by pre­tend­ing to address a deep issue that is, in fact, pro­foundly trivial.

Here’s what I mean: You are a lit­tle bit hun­gry, and on two suc­ces­sive days you get to eat lim­it­less amounts of one of two foods with the same exact calo­rie con­tent. One tastes absolutely great, and the other tastes absolutely hor­ri­ble. Do you think you will eat exactly the same amount of both?

Eating more of a food that tastes great (as in: “Betcha’ can’t eat just one!”) is NOT an invi­ta­tion to ques­tion a basic law of physics. It’s obvi­ous to the point of truly triv­ial. Food made to taste really good will likely goad us into eat­ing more calo­ries. Duh.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at HuffingtonPost.com.