Mota Boy
11-02-2006, 04:25 AM
The way calories are talked about in this country annoys me in its extreme oversimplification - there's bad science and awful logic being thrown around left and right. People read a couple statistics on calories, put two and two together and think they're some kinda expert on nutrition.
It's even in the New York Times, for chrissakes. I read an article a while ago on nutrition that ended up throwing in a warning about butter - how even an innocent dab of putter can end up leading to obesity. Don't believe me? Well, a dab of butter is thirty calories. Keep gorging yourself that way and you'll gain three pounds a year, piggy.
I mean, come the fuck on. The reporter took thirty and multiplied it by 365 to get the extra calories you'd take in in a year by adding thirty a day and got 10,950, then divided it by the amount of calories it takes to add on one pound o' flesh, 3500 to arrive at three. Ta-da!
Statistics like these are thrown around all the time. Drinking a coke a day will cause you to gain ten pounds over a year, just one Snickers a week will blow your ass up by five pounds come Christmas, etc. An atrocious abuse of factoids.
Hold on there, Encyclopedia Brown. You're actually telling me that thirty calories a day is gonna butter me up? First off, you're assuming that eating habits are constant when they're anything but. Secondly, you're assuming that I'm currently gorging at or over my daily recommended dose, and that I will be doing so every day. If I'm currently averaging, say, 1,600 a day I can stand to throw down thirty more of those bad boys without worrying how I'll look come swimsuit season. Lastly though - and most egregiously - you're assuming that my body will magically transfer the calories into fat the instant they touch my lips. You're ignoring the relationship between food and metabolism. You ever gone a while without eating? Doesn't matter how much of a whale you are, you get pretty damn weak. Why? You don't eat, your body goes into starvation mode. Your metabolism shuts down to preserve your energy. When it slinks to a crawl, you're burning less calories than normal. Conversely, when you gorge yourself, your body kicks up to deal with the food. If I've been inactive for a while, have a decent-sized lunch and go to sit down for a bit, I start overheating like whoa. I just become a furnace as my body doesn't know what to do with all the extra energy. Sure, some of it does go to fat, but the wild swings in the rate my metabolism do wonders for equalizing the amount of calories that my body actually has left over at the end of the day.
On the other side of the spectrum, I read a while ago how "Lite" beer was mostly a marketing ploy. Lite beer actually normally contains only thirty less calories than regular beer. Said the man defending "real" beer, "...and you burn off thirty calories in an hour of sleep." Oh, really bonehead? So you're saying that after I drink a beer, I should take an hour-long nap to get back in shape? First, many people that drink beer don't just grab one. I'm in college, buck-o. Girls here don't mind knocking back twelve cans in a night. That's 360 extra calories (37.5 lbs. a year!!!). And while they'll burn it off by passing out for twelve hours, you're ignoring that they could've spent that shut-eye attacking calories from the burger they ate for dinner.
Finally, I saw an article the other day in USA today on how women that drank four extra glasses of water a day lost, on average, two pounds more a year than women that didn't. The researcher was quoted as saying something like "We've known that water aided digestion, but perhaps it has some as-yet-unknown other affect that benefits weight loss." No shit, Sherlock. I hate to do your homework for you, but I figured this out years ago, without having to conduct any fancy fuckin' study. First off, water has zero calories, so when you drink it you're not adding anything to your body. However, the act of drinking water burns calories. On the obvious side, you've gotta lift the glass to your mouth, swallow, move it into your bloodstream, remove it from your bloodstream into your kidneys, walk over the the toilet and send it back from whence it came, all of which burn... ding ding ding! That's right Einstein, calories. On a more subtle note (but still pretty empirically obvious if you'd have put two seconds of thought into it), water comes into your body at room temperature or (more often than not) below. It exits it at about 98.6 degrees. Now, let's review the dictionary definition of a calorie - A unit of energy-producing potential supplied by food and released upon oxidation by the body, equal to the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water by 1°C at one atmosphere pressure. Also called nutritionist's calorie.
Well, what do you know - a calorie is the amount of energy it takes to heat water. Let's say that the women drink an extra kilo of water a day, that starts off at 17°C (62.6°F) and ends up at 37°C (98.6°F). Well, that's twenty calories burned a day, 7,300 a year. Or two pounds. [and just in case you think I'm being hypocritical for using this calculation after mocking it earlier, we were already told that the women, on average, drank more water a day, and water, since it contains no energy, has a relatively small impact on your metabolism] Be sure to make me co-author of your latest astonishing find.
Oh man, the lengths I'll go to avoid cramming for an Econ exam...
It's even in the New York Times, for chrissakes. I read an article a while ago on nutrition that ended up throwing in a warning about butter - how even an innocent dab of putter can end up leading to obesity. Don't believe me? Well, a dab of butter is thirty calories. Keep gorging yourself that way and you'll gain three pounds a year, piggy.
I mean, come the fuck on. The reporter took thirty and multiplied it by 365 to get the extra calories you'd take in in a year by adding thirty a day and got 10,950, then divided it by the amount of calories it takes to add on one pound o' flesh, 3500 to arrive at three. Ta-da!
Statistics like these are thrown around all the time. Drinking a coke a day will cause you to gain ten pounds over a year, just one Snickers a week will blow your ass up by five pounds come Christmas, etc. An atrocious abuse of factoids.
Hold on there, Encyclopedia Brown. You're actually telling me that thirty calories a day is gonna butter me up? First off, you're assuming that eating habits are constant when they're anything but. Secondly, you're assuming that I'm currently gorging at or over my daily recommended dose, and that I will be doing so every day. If I'm currently averaging, say, 1,600 a day I can stand to throw down thirty more of those bad boys without worrying how I'll look come swimsuit season. Lastly though - and most egregiously - you're assuming that my body will magically transfer the calories into fat the instant they touch my lips. You're ignoring the relationship between food and metabolism. You ever gone a while without eating? Doesn't matter how much of a whale you are, you get pretty damn weak. Why? You don't eat, your body goes into starvation mode. Your metabolism shuts down to preserve your energy. When it slinks to a crawl, you're burning less calories than normal. Conversely, when you gorge yourself, your body kicks up to deal with the food. If I've been inactive for a while, have a decent-sized lunch and go to sit down for a bit, I start overheating like whoa. I just become a furnace as my body doesn't know what to do with all the extra energy. Sure, some of it does go to fat, but the wild swings in the rate my metabolism do wonders for equalizing the amount of calories that my body actually has left over at the end of the day.
On the other side of the spectrum, I read a while ago how "Lite" beer was mostly a marketing ploy. Lite beer actually normally contains only thirty less calories than regular beer. Said the man defending "real" beer, "...and you burn off thirty calories in an hour of sleep." Oh, really bonehead? So you're saying that after I drink a beer, I should take an hour-long nap to get back in shape? First, many people that drink beer don't just grab one. I'm in college, buck-o. Girls here don't mind knocking back twelve cans in a night. That's 360 extra calories (37.5 lbs. a year!!!). And while they'll burn it off by passing out for twelve hours, you're ignoring that they could've spent that shut-eye attacking calories from the burger they ate for dinner.
Finally, I saw an article the other day in USA today on how women that drank four extra glasses of water a day lost, on average, two pounds more a year than women that didn't. The researcher was quoted as saying something like "We've known that water aided digestion, but perhaps it has some as-yet-unknown other affect that benefits weight loss." No shit, Sherlock. I hate to do your homework for you, but I figured this out years ago, without having to conduct any fancy fuckin' study. First off, water has zero calories, so when you drink it you're not adding anything to your body. However, the act of drinking water burns calories. On the obvious side, you've gotta lift the glass to your mouth, swallow, move it into your bloodstream, remove it from your bloodstream into your kidneys, walk over the the toilet and send it back from whence it came, all of which burn... ding ding ding! That's right Einstein, calories. On a more subtle note (but still pretty empirically obvious if you'd have put two seconds of thought into it), water comes into your body at room temperature or (more often than not) below. It exits it at about 98.6 degrees. Now, let's review the dictionary definition of a calorie - A unit of energy-producing potential supplied by food and released upon oxidation by the body, equal to the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water by 1°C at one atmosphere pressure. Also called nutritionist's calorie.
Well, what do you know - a calorie is the amount of energy it takes to heat water. Let's say that the women drink an extra kilo of water a day, that starts off at 17°C (62.6°F) and ends up at 37°C (98.6°F). Well, that's twenty calories burned a day, 7,300 a year. Or two pounds. [and just in case you think I'm being hypocritical for using this calculation after mocking it earlier, we were already told that the women, on average, drank more water a day, and water, since it contains no energy, has a relatively small impact on your metabolism] Be sure to make me co-author of your latest astonishing find.
Oh man, the lengths I'll go to avoid cramming for an Econ exam...