Sat, Aug-04-12, 11:16
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Senior Member
Posts: 1,449
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Plan: Atkins, Newcastle
Stats: 260/221.8/165
BF:Highest weight 260
Progress: 40%
Location: Northern California
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The very squishy science of counting calories
Maybe those calorie counts on food labels are not quite true?
Quote:
We have one standard metric in this country for the amount of energy in a given quantity of food: the calorie. Just about every food you can find in the grocery store, aside from fresh produce, comes branded with a calorie count. The new health-care law will soon require chain restaurants to post the caloric content of standard menu items.
There’s just one problem: The methodology for determining caloric content, developed about a century ago, may not be all that accurate. That is what scientists are learning as they try to answer what seems like a pretty simple question: How many calories does an almond have?
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What they found, as described by study author David Bear: “When people are consuming nuts, the amount of fat in the feces goes up. And that suggests that we’re not absorbing all the fat or calories that’s in the nut.”
In other words, there’s might be a whole lot of fat in almonds that shows up in a bomb calorimeter, but a good amount of it never gets absorbed by the body. As a result, the researchers concluded that almonds actually have 20 percent fewer calories than we currently think.
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