Calories?
I bet you have heard the word “calorie”
Also, if you have ever attempted to lose weight or add weight (build muscle), then your fitness trainer or dietician/nutritionist may have mentioned calories somewhere.
They may have mentioned that if you wanted to lose weight you need to be in a calorie-deficit or if you wanted to build muscle then you need to be in calorie-surplus.
Indeed, the word calorie has become a buzzword in the fitness industry, with popular cliché such as “calories in, calories out” dominating and defining the weigh-loss strategy for millions around the world.
Somewhere along the line, we learned something about calories and kilojoules in our secondary science classes but we have since then forgotten what they are and what they mean. Besides, most of it was theoretical with little or no immediate practical application.
But now, in the fitness world, and for someone looking to gain muscles or lose weight, it helps to know something about this seemingly simple yet complex concept.
So where do we start?
From the beginning. A little history and background on how we use calorie to determine the energy of food suffice.
Antoine Lavoisier, a famous scientist living at the time of the French Revolution, was the first to understand that we ‘burn’ food as our source of energy. He measured the calorific units in food by inventing a bomb calorimeter, which was like a mini oven surrounded by water.
This allowed food items to be burnt in order to measure their calorific value based on the heat that they each gave off to the surrounding water. He also fed unfortunate guinea pigs different diets and invented a similar device to put them in while alive, surrounded by ice, to observe the effects of how they converted food into heat energy.
In the late nineteenth century, an American scientist named Wilbur Atwater dedicated his entire life to conducting experiments to determine the calorie count of over 4,000 food items.
He not only measured the energy given off by the food, but would also feed them to volunteers and collect all the resulting heat, urine and stool samples produced. He would then carefully burn the urine and stool samples and work out how much energy they contained.
He worked out that fat was roughly twice as energy dense as carbohydrates or protein, which was the beginning of the idea, now so intrinsic to our ideas about health and nutrition, that fat is particularly ‘fattening’.
His findings are still used today on food labels around the world and his work had a profound and lasting effect on the power and precision of the calorie as a unit to measure energy.
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