Eli5 So we need calories to survive. If there are 100 calories in a spoon of oil, how come we can’t survive on oil for emergencies?

Question

Eli5 So we need calories to survive. If there are 100 calories in a spoon of oil, how come we can’t survive on oil for emergencies?

In: 3554

Answer 1

There is a concept called bioavailability , and it basically means “how easy is it for the body to use the components of what you eat”.

So for example, Meat has whats called haem iron, which compared to the Iron in vegetables is more bioavailability. You’ll get 15-35% of the iron in a steak, but just 2-20% from a vegetable.

This is also true of energy, which is what calories measure. The calories in a piece of chocolate for example are extremely bioavailable. Your blood sugar will shoot up dramatically very quickly all at once. Eat the same amount of calories in fruit and your blood sugar won’t shoot up as much. This is because the fibre makes it harder to process the food, which is actually a good thing.

For oil, we aren’t very good at digesting absorbing and metabolising it. Your gallbladder has to produce bile to break down the fats, and it can only do so much..

So a spoonful of cooking oil neat is likely to just pass through you. Your body cant absorb and convert the calories into something useful.