Like, water has no calories. But plants do? And some random elements have like billions of calories but if you just pick up a rock and eat it you won’t get any energy.
In: Biology
Nutritional calories are measuring how much energy you get from food when you digest it. Digestion means taking bigger molecules and breaking them down into smaller molecules, releasing energy.
Your body can’t break down water into anything smaller. Water is a really happy, stable molecule. It’s not easy to break water down into the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that make it up.
You can digest plants, because plants have molecules in them like sugars and other carbohydrates, which your body can digest and get energy from.
When people talk about things like uranium having calories, they’re kind of joking. They’re talking about the energy that uranium could release in a nuclear reaction, and measuring it in calories. You can’t eat uranium. And if uranium was undergoing a nuclear reaction in your stomach, it wouldn’t nourish you. It would just kill you. And everyone around you.
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