Marion Freijsen A blog about Sports, Fitness & Health

Calories

Here’s another one of those great topics that you could spend hours on…Calories. We all know what they are used for – basically as a measurement of the richness of food in the sense that if you eat too many calories, you will gain weight and if you eat less – you will lose some. But then I got the question – what is a Calorie? Hmmmm, nice subject for a Saturday morning.

So a Calorie is indeed a measure of energy – to be exact, originally it was a measure of how much heat you needed to warm up one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. I won’t go into the exact science here, but you do have Calories which are actually 1000 calories (small c) – commonly we just use calorie on food labels.

Knowing that it is a measure of heat, doesn’t tell you yet, how you know what the calorie content of an almond is, or how this varies with that of a grape, or a peanut. Have you ever tried to use these to heat up water? No, didn’t think so. But science is helpful – they developed a calorimeter, a special unit that you can use to burn food so that the heat it releases can be measured. Now we can burn our almonds or peanuts and find out exactly how much heat it generates and convert that to its calorific value (pfffff). But there is one further step to take, not all heat that is generated could actually be used by our bodies as energy, so there is a % (approx. 85% of the heat is useful energy) applied that will determine finally how useful as an energy source a certain food is, and this is the calorie value you will find on a label.

One further thing to add to this – you don’t find useful calories in all foods. Only Carbohydrates, fats, proteins (which I have talked about before), and some other acids and ethanol contain this food energy. All foods contain more or less of these nutrients. All other things are non-calorific. So take tea or coffee for instance, they contain NO calories unless you douse them with milk and sugar.

Carbohydrates and Protein contain 4.2 calories per gram, Fats 9 calories per gram… so you see that 1 gram of butter will need more output from you to burn it again then 1 gram of almonds.

And there you go – a little overview of what calories really are. But in the end, you still have to make sure that you burn as many of them on average in a day, as you consume if you want to stay the same weight!

Have a great weekend.

Song for the day on the theme of the day:  Fire Burning – Sean Kingston