ELI5- If calories are units of energy how does caffeine give you energy if it doesn’t contain calories?
In: Chemistry
I feel like some of these answers kind of skirt around the answer a bit. Does caffeine give you energy? If you take it You’d probably say yes. Seems like that prompted the question. But, there’s a difference between the way we colloquially use the term “energy” and how we use it when referring to the physics concept energy that has units as you stated in the title.
A calorie is energy in the physics sense. We could measure food for calories, we could measure calories in a battery if we wanted to. When people drink caffeine and it gives them “energy” they’re just referring to the feeling of alertness and lack of tiredness and stimulation caffeine gives (it’s a pretty classic stimulant for humans biologically speaking). That’s absolutely true, and if you called that energy in a non scientific setting you wouldn’t be wrong. But I’m that’s not the same as the unit energy. The other answers here give great answers as far as physics energy is concerned. I just wanted to elaborate because some answers are a bit too rigid.
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