Have you ever heard the phrase, "A calorie is a calorie?" I know I have, from friends and family to people like doctors and nutritionists. I'm here to tell you that they are dead wrong. Not only that, I'll tell you about a simple experiment you can do yourself to prove that they're wrong. Ready?
It was once commonly believed that all calories were essentially the same, and that controlling your weight was simply a matter of keeping the total number of calories in the right range. Many people still do believe this, even though it is clearly false.
The amount of calories in a serving of food tell you how much energy that serving can produce when you eat it. So at that level, it is true that all calories are the same. But that's a very simplistic view of the situation. Different kinds of food have wildly different effects on your body, even if you eat the same number of calories of each.
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So eating 100 calories worth of steak (protein) will have a different effect on your body than 100 calories worth of white bread (simple carbohydrate) will. And eating 100 calories of whole-grain bread (complex carbohydrate) will affect your body differently than the white bread too. 100 calories worth of salad dressing (fat) will have yet a different effect.
Clearly, when it comes to how they affect your body, not all calories are the same. Simple calorie counting accomplishes little if you don't control the types of calories you are consuming. Still don't believe me? Here's that experiment I was telling you about:
To prove to yourself that not all calories are the same when it comes to how they affect the human body, imagine this. Please don't actually try this experiment. You'll see why in a minute. Just think it through for
Abstract: Marshmallows have more Calories per gram. Marshmallows have .2079 J/g℃ and cheese puffs have 1.08x103 J/g℃. My hypothesis was that marshmallows have more Calories per gram and my results confirmed my hypothesis because there is a .2068 J/g℃ difference.
Since it’s rolled in cheese and fried, which is really unhealthy, the high amount of calories makes sense. We can now conclude that burning the food didn't really make much of a difference in calories, it still shows the cheeto as high in calorie no matter how much was burned off, in this case 1.38 grams was burned. While comparing the nutritional labels of marshmallows and cheetos, the cheetos ended having the highest energy content, as predicted since the fats and carbs are higher than the marshmallows. During the experiment, we only came across a few errors. One our calorimeter did not work so we had to switch to a thermometer for the rest of the lab, our ring stand kept falling over and our lighter stopped working at one point but none of these errors affected our data.
...n it does to eat just enough calories. If a chicken sandwich at McDonalds is $1.00 with 400 calories, a head of romaine lettuce costs $3.49 and has less than 100 calories for one serving.
In the experiment, 0.436 Calories per gram were found when dividing the average heat per mass of food by 1000. The standard deviation proved that this number can either be moved up 0.082 Cal/g or down. This is nowhere near the 3.2 Calories per gram which appeared on the label
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Credibility Statement: Just like you, I am a college student. I too have to live with
human bodies. All these changes in the food are what people refer to as food