![]() “Apply it to some foods, and Atwater’s system kind of just falls apart,” Baer says. Atwater’s system was pretty accurate for the foods he measured-but it was never intended to be applied to every morsel we put in our mouths today, says David Baer, a research physiologist at the U.S. (Only rarely do we still blow food up.)Īlas, people are not bomb calorimeters and all foods aren’t created equal. Based on the energy difference between what participants ate and what they excreted, Atwater determined that there are 9 calories in a gram of fat, 4 in a gram of carbohydrates, and 4 in a gram of protein. ![]() Of course, our bodies don’t use every particle of food we eat, so Atwater also collected the poop and pee of participants and… yep, blew that up too. (The calories you see on a nutrition label are actually kilocalories-the energy needed to raise the temperature of a liter of water by one degree.) The higher the energy of the food, the more it would heat the surrounding water-the calorie is the unit of energy needed to raise the temperature of one milliliter of water by one degree celsius. He’d place the food inside the device, run an electric current through it, then boom. Atwater used a device called a bomb calorimeter, a sealed container situated in a known quantity of water, which measures the amount of heat produced during a chemical reaction. ![]() So, where did the calorie come from anyway? In the late nineteenth century, American chemist Wilbur Olin Atwater set out to measure the energy we put into our bodies by, quite literally, blowing food up. “People should not rely on this as the Bible of food intake and expenditure,” says Susanne Votruba, a research dietitian at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). In fact, counting your daily calorie consumption doesn’t always correlate with the amount of energy our bodies consume and burn. While consistent diet monitoring can help some people lose weight ( maintaining that weight loss is a different story), actual calorie-tracking isn’t as accurate as it might seem. Plug in your age, size, and sex, and they’ll claim to tell you exactly how many calories you need in order to lose or maintain your weight. Hundreds of diet-tracking apps, from MyFitnessPal to Livestrong, boast databases of nutrition information for thousands of foods. Finding ways to monitor where you fall in this caloric balance has never been easier. Eat more than you burn, and you’ll gain weight eat less, and you’ll lose weight. Calories in, calories out-it’s diet dogma.
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