THE CALORIE MYTH: WHY COUNTING CALORIES IS THE WRONG WAY TO LOSE WEIGHT
“The concept that “a calorie is a calorie” forms the basis for the most conventional weight loss strategies. According to this principle, obesity results from simply taking in more calories than you expend.
The proposed cure is to eat less and move more.
The problem is that restricting calories long term is not sustainable. In other words, they only address the symptoms of obesity, but not the physiological drive to overeat. They do not address the issues from a hormonal standpoint.
The reality is that not all calories are created equal.
Most calorie restriction diets just don’t work. We've been fooled.
Dropping a few pounds is not a simple matter of eating less. In fact, if you eat too little, you risk setting off a chain of molecular events inside your body that can actually cause you to gain weight.
Nonetheless, conventional wisdom tells us that if we consume fewer calories we will lose weight. This is what our culture has ingrained into our minds.
The issue is, this doesn’t tell the full story. Calories are absolutely important. But it isn’t the amount of calories. It’s the type of calories you consume that makes a difference in terms of how much you weigh and how healthy you are.
What are Calories and Where do They Come From?
So what the heck is a calorie anyway?
A calorie is basically a unit of energy. If you want to get specific, it is defined as the quantity of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree C (at atmospheric pressure).
We receive calories from the foods we consume. We consume food, and the chemical processes that make up our metabolism break up this food and convert it into usable energy.
Burning this energy created by our metabolic machine allows us to do everything from breathing to lifting weights.
A good analogy is putting fuel into your car. You have to put the fuel in the tank to make the car go. This is no different than people and food. Food is our fuel. We consume calories so that we have fuel to burn. Calories allow us to run.
We need a certain amount of caloric intake just to sustain our body’s basic functions. And then we need some additional calories to do things like get out of bed, take a shower, go to work.
A few hundred years ago Isaac Newton proved that all energy in the universe is conserved—he called this the first law of thermodynamics. Applied to your weight and what you know about caloric intake, this law implies that if you eat the same number of calories you burn, you will stay the same weight. If you eat more calories than you burn, you will gain weight; if you eat less than you burn, you will lose weight.
This is logical. Right?
The problem? It’s not true.
And I believed it for years. I’m a chemical engineer, and this is a basic principle.
So what’s the problem?
Why All Calories are NOT Created Equal
I wouldn’t suggest that Isaac Newton’s laws first law of thermodynamics is incorrect. It’s not. But how it is applied to the calories you eat is not as simple as the first law of thermodynamics suggests.
Consider this physics related example that you might remember from grade school. Take one pound of feathers and one pound of lead and drop them in a vacuum. Which drops faster? The answer is of course, they fall at the same rate. Remember, we’re not talking about the real world. We’re in a vacuum. They both have the same mass, so they drop at the same rate.
Now take that same pound of feathers and pound of lead and drop them off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.. Which drops faster?
If you answered “lead” this time, you’re right!
Since we’re not in a vacuum anymore, you have to consider air resistance. You can’t see it, you you can’t smell it, you can’t taste it. But air resistance is real, and it’s there. It affects how lead and feathers move through it. Even though the lead and feathers in this example have the same weight/mass, they have different properties that cause them to move through air differently.
Calories can be thought of in the same way. When calories are burned in a laboratory, they are all created equal and release the same amount of energy. There is no difference between a thousand calories of spinach or a thousand calories of Cheetos — until they are metabolized.
Your body’s metabolism is like the air resistance in the example above. The calories you eat are absorbed into the body at different rates. They contain different amounts of fiber, carbohydrates, protein, fat, and nutrients. All of this translate into different complex metabolic signals that control your weight. You might not be able to see, taste, or smell your metabolism anymore than you can see air resistance, but just like air resistance impacts the speed at which objects fall, the types of calories you eat has an impact on how things are absorbed, and how they impact your weight/fat stores.
For instance, all the sugar from a soda enters your bloodstream rapidly, while the same amount of sugar from kidney beans enters your blood slowly and some of it may not even be absorbed because of the high fiber content in the beans.
If you drink a soda and all the sugar in it goes into your bloodstream at once, the calories you aren’t using at that moment will be stored for use at another time...and guess what they’re stored as? Yep, FAT.
On the other hand, if you eat the kidney beans, or spinach, and the sugar in them is absorbed over time, your body has a greater chance to make use of those calories. That means more of them will be burned and less will be stored as fat. Not to mention, the high fiber content of the beans, means that not all of the calories will be absorbed - some of it will pass right through.
Food that enters your blood stream quickly promotes weight gain; food that enters slowly promotes weight loss.
Recent studies have refuted this claim that all calories are created equal. Studies show that high carb diets composed of rapidly absorbed sugars can increase blood sugar and insulin levels, which lead to weight gain. This also leads to increases in cholesterol and triglycerides that lead to a fatty liver, and in turn cause even more weight gain. So rapidly absorbed glucose or sugars increase both sugars and fats in the blood and liver, doubling your problems.
Walter Willett, M.D., a nutrition researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health designed a study to determine whether low-fat or low-carbohydrate diets were better for losing weight.
The results were surprising. The researchers fed their group of overweight patients three different diets all carefully controlled and prepared for them daily in a Boston restaurant for 12 weeks. The first group ate a low-fat diet of 1,500 calories (55% carbohydrate, 30% fat, 15% protein) for the women and 1,800 calories for the men. The second group ate the exact same number of calories but from a low-carbohydrate diet (5% carbohydrate, 30% protein, 65% fat). The third group also consumed a low-carbohydrate diet, but they ate 300 more calories a day than the other group: 1,800 for women and 2,100 for men.
The researchers found that the low-carb group eating the same number of calories as the low-fat group actually lost more weight. The low-carb group lost an average of 23 pounds versus 17 pounds for the low-fat group while eating exactly the same number of calories. That’s 6 pounds more in 12 weeks. While the study was only 12 weeks, the findings are worth considering (study here).
The real question is, what type of carbs and fats were used. The “low carb” diet was predominately a diet of whole unprocessed foods – lean animal protein, vegetables, whole grains, and beans – commonly referred to as the Mediterranean style diet. The low fat group ate foods that were higher in refined carbohydrates. But as we are learning here, the low carb movement will also go by the “weigh-side”.
But what was even more surprising was that the group eating 300 more calories a day with the low-carb diet lost more weight than those eating the low-fat diet, even though the 25,000 more calories they ate should have amounted to seven pounds of increased weight. They actually lost an average of 20 pounds or 3 pounds per person more than the low-fat group, who ate 25,000 less calories during the 12 weeks.
One final study adds to this point. Harvard professor, Dr. David Ludwig studied three groups of overweight children, providing each group a breakfast containing the identical number of calories. One group ate instant oatmeal, one group had steel-cut oats, and the third group had a vegetable omelet and fruit.
Their blood was measured before they ate and every 30 minutes after for the next five hours. Following breakfast, they ate a lunch identical to breakfast. After finishing lunch, they were told to eat whenever they were very hungry for the rest of the afternoon. What happened was surprising.
Many of you would think that the healthiest breakfast would be the oatmeal. But it was actually the omelet. The group that ate the instant oatmeal (the breakfast that entered the blood stream and turned to sugar the fastest) ate 81% more food in the afternoon than the group that had the omelet. Not only were they hungrier, but also their blood tests looked drastically different. The instant oatmeal group had higher levels of insulin, blood sugar, blood fats and adrenalin even though they consumed the same calories as the omelet group. Though the steel cut oats were better than the refined oats, the children who ate the steel cut oats still ate 51% more food than the children who ate the omelet.
The conclusion here is that the kinds of calories you eat have a large effect on how much fat you gain, because different types of food are metabolized in different ways (study here).
What’s even more important to consider is that the calories themselves have an affect on how your metabolism functions. The type of food you eat has a big impact on what your genes instruct your metabolism to do.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The types of calories you consume have a dual impact on the way you metabolize food. They contain information for your genes which control your metabolism AND they act as an energy source . The information contained in the foods changes your metabolism which can increase or decrease your weight.