So much of the dialogue on nutrition and health is driven my myths and misinformation. Here, we lay bare and deconstruct some of the worst story lines out there that are actually harming our health and serve as fodder for the food and beverage industry that is trying to convince you that it all all your fault – that you simply eat too much and don’t exercise enough. All calories are the same, so just eat in moderation they say! Hogwash.
Do you believe a calorie is a calorie?
The food industry vigorously promotes the myth “a calorie is a calorie.” But a calorie is NOT a calorie.
- Fiber. You eat 160 calories in almonds, but only absorb 130—because some fiber calories pass through without metabolizing. Vegetables, greens, beans and whole grains are all high in fiber.
- Reference study here.) We found that total caloric availability was unrelated to diabetes prevalence; for every extra 150 calories per day, diabetes prevalence rose by only 0.1 percent. But if those 150 calories were from added sugar, diabetes prevalence rose 11-fold, by 1.1 percent. Yet Coca-Cola created their Coming Together campaign saying, “All calories count.” They want you to believe the lie that a calorie is a calorie. The food industry will try to sew the seeds of doubt. But they cannot refute the science. THE GOOD NEWS: In our study, countries where sugar availability fell showed decreases in English and in Spanish, click here.
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Counting calories is unhelpful for weight loss or disease prevention.
The Energy Balance Story Must Change
The Big DeBunk: Energy Balance is Marketing Mythology
Eight primary diseases related to metabolic dysfunction account for a staggering 75 percent of the healthcare costs in the US. In order to escape responsibility for their primary role in the pandemic of metabolic disease, food and beverage corporations divert the focus of responsibility to the consumer by hiding behind a faulty concept they call “energy balance”. This erroneous and misleading cornerstone of the master narrative has been used to dominate the conversation about food and fitness for decades while the so-called “science” being used to support it is so bad that you can’t even call it a hypothesis. It’s just nonsense.
Current food industry marketing relies on the classic propaganda principle that if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. Learning how to separate fact from fiction is essential if we are going to make any progress toward improving our collective health.
In order to deconstruct the energy balance myth, one must work through some basic science—physics, biology, chemistry. A little history doesn’t hurt either.
What is the energy balance myth?
Simply stated:
Energy in (E+) + Energy out (E-) = Equilibrium or Change in Body Stores
The same amount of ENERGY IN (calories consumed) and ENERGY OUT
(calories burned) over time = body weight stays the same. More IN than OUT over time = weight gain. More OUT than IN over time = weight loss.
On the surface, this sounds like common sense – basic math really. Sadly, this oversimplification grossly exploits a false assumption, and plays a leading role in the global health pandemic of diet-related disease. Let’s gain a better understanding of our metabolic health using real science, not mythology.
E is for Energy, F is for Fuel
Let’s begin with the big E, energy. In reality, when they say “energy”, they are actually referring to food. Is food energy? Here is where the false assumption comes in. Food contains energy. But, to be more accurate, food is fuel. The difference between fuel and energy is critical.
In physics, energy is a property of objects which can be transferred to other objects or converted into different forms, but cannot be created or destroyed. The two main types of energy are kinetic and potential energy.
Kinetic energy is energy that is in motion. Moving water and wind are good examples of kinetic energy.
Potential energy is stored energy. Examples of potential energy are oil sitting in a barrel, water in a lake, or food on your plate. This energy is referred to as potential energy, because if it were released, it would do a lot of work.
Fuels are any materials that store potential energy in forms that can be released and used for work. In physics, work is the transfer of energy involved with the action of a force. This sounds a little tricky, so here is a good illustration of this – a pitcher throwing a ball:
The baseball pitcher does “work” on the baseball by applying a force to it over the distance it moves while in his grip. What fuels the pitcher’s work? Food.
The processed food industry wants us to call food energy because the concept of fuel would lead us down a critical thinking path that requires assembling a real formula for nutrition and metabolism. That path would also lead to the inevitable conclusion that a calorie is not a calorie. It is vital that we understand that energy and fuel are not the same.
Dropping the Bomb
The device that measures calories, or the units of energy contained in food, is something called the Bomb Calorimeter. Pierre Eugène Marcellin Berthelot (1827-1907), a French chemist, invented the bomb calorimeter in 1881. The bomb calorimeter determines the heat of combustion of food substances by burning it in a metal chamber that is placed in an insulated vessel of water. Heat generated by the burning is transferred to the water. The increase in temperature of the water and the measured weights of both the substance and the water are used to determine the heat released by the substance.
Image of a 19th Century Bomb Calorimeter
The central unit of measurement for human nutrition, the calorie, is derived from this device invented 234 years ago that burns things up in a small oven. This highlights another false assumption in the energy balance myth: the human body is not an oven.
The process by which potential energy is released from food in the human body isn’t combustion—it’s metabolism. Metabolism includes all the chemical reactions involved in maintaining our living cells. In other words, it’s bioactive chemistry. Metabolism is a series of chemical reactions that are in a constant state of flow between catabolism – the breakdown of molecules to obtain energy – and anabolism – the synthesis of all compounds needed by the cells. And, importantly, metabolism is as efficient as its fuel.
We are all familiar with the expression “You are what you eat.” If you understand how the metabolic system functions, then you’ll realize that it is more accurate to say “You are what you metabolize”. What you metabolize depends on many variables: the quality and contents of the food you eat, the status of your metabolic system, the flora in your gut, your stress levels, and even how much sleep you got last night.
Equivalent calories from a glass of milk and sugary soda are processed in very different ways in the human body. The sugars are metabolized by distinct pathways. While one substrate provides nourishment, the other delivers excess energy that can only be stored as fat. The second pathway also triggers a cascade of negative consequences that damages the liver and impairs the efficiency of metabolism. Combined, these events promote weight gain and metabolic disease.
Not surprisingly, the processed food industry would like you to believe that a handful of Skittles is the same as a handful of almonds. The calories may be the same in a bomb calorimeter, but the effects of their metabolism in the human body are not.
Therefore, a more accurate understanding is that food is not energy. Food is a substance that contains energy as well as other values (positive and negative) that can be transferred to a living organism (with harmful or helpful effects). This food is then metabolized in ways that vary widely depending on the quality of the food and the condition of the organism consuming it.
Food is more than the sum of its parts.
Food is even more than fuel. Real food is alive and complex and contains bioactive macronutrients (fat, protein and carbohydrates including fiber), micronutrients including vitamins and minerals, beneficial phytochemicals, along with millions of microorganisms.
Processing food removes many of the beneficial components of food (fiber, nutrients, etc.) to increase shelf life and “palatability”. To make matters worse, the processed food industry uses thousands of “additives”. Look at the online databases called EAFUS (Everything Added to Food in the U.S.) and GRAS (Generally Regarded as Safe). It is disturbing to review these long lists of exotic chemicals that now permeate our food supply.
The most dominant industrial additive in the global food supply is sugar…not the intrinsic sugar found in fruits and vegetables and packaged with fiber, vitamins and minerals, but the factory-produced sugar from commodity crops such as beets, corn, and sugar cane. There is a huge difference between the two.
The average American consumes 22.6 teaspoons of sugar per day. That’s 107 grams, half of which is fructose. Many Americans consume more than twice this amount. There are many processes that produce refined sugars, but the common denominators include removing fiber and nutrients and concentrating the sugar to unnatural levels. These forms of sugar have very different impacts in the human body than the sugar you get from eating an orange, and are now a leading cause of diet-related disease.
At the core of every human life is a metabolic system – a cellular engine that can be powerfully transformative and uplifting or degenerative and debilitating – killing us slowly and painfully over the course of our (shortened and degraded) lives. The metabolic system is comprised of organs, hormones and enzymes that work together to digest, absorb, process, transport, and excrete the constituents that are essential to life. When this system becomes faulty because of the fuel you feed it, health is compromised. It is the difference between wellness and illness.
So why do we let the food and beverage industry tell us that all calories are the same? “Calories in – Calories out” they say. “We eat too much and exercise too little.” Propagandists bank on you accepting false assertions as truth. The idea of “energy balance” is a powerful marketing myth that leads the public to accept a false proposition as science. The processed food industry thrives by side-stepping critical thought and un-biased science, using big-budget marketing as a tool for deception. There is no question that this strategy has worked for the last half century. The question now is whether discerning food consumers can muster enough science and critical thinking to see through the myths and lies of the processed food industry and restore their health by simply eating real food.
-Wolfram Alderson
Wolfram Alderson was the Founding Executive Director for the Institute for Responsible Nutrition and currently serves as CEO of the Hypoglycemia Support Foundation. He recently had his DNA analyzed and discovered that an estimated 3.0% of his DNA is from Neanderthals, apparently higher than average. This fact hasn’t deterred him from cultivating a passionate interest in nutrition science. Despite his origins, he doesn’t eat “Paleo”; he just eats real food.
If you're fat, it's your fault!
“The processed food and soft drink industries promote the idea that obesity is caused by eating too much and exercising too little. They say the problem is in the quantity of food that you eat, not in the quality of food that they sell. They call this “common sense” and we’ve swallowed it hook, line and sinker. But I’m a scientist. I don’t believe in “common sense.” I believe in science. And the science tells us something entirely different.”
– Dr. Lustig, Sweet Revenge: Turning the Tables on Processed Food
- In general, we humans are very good at storing energy as helped early humans to survive. However the genetic mechanisms that helped us survive then do us little good in our current food environment; they now work to our detriment by encouraging over consumption and unnecessary “obesogenic” environments: at every turn we’re presented with an abundance of tasty, satisfying, and often inexpensive foods that are hard to turn down. These foods help us meet our energy needs, but often have unforeseen health consequences. This food environment, coupled with the disappearance of physically active work lives have resulted in a population-wide shift to overweight and disordered metabolism.
- Each year billions of dollars are spent to convince the public to purchase processed foods. Companies wouldn’t spend that kind of money on marketing if it weren’t working as intended. Food marketing works.
