If one gram of fat contains 9 calories, and there are about 454 grams in a pound, how come 1 pound of fat is commonly equated to be about 3,500 calories instead of about 4,000 calories?

Question

If one gram of fat contains 9 calories, and there are about 454 grams in a pound, how come 1 pound of fat is commonly equated to be about 3,500 calories instead of about 4,000 calories?

In: 10

Answer 1

Most of this comes down to rounding numbers for presentation purposes.

If I told you that you could lose 1 pound a week by cutting out 3500 calories from your diet, you can divide that 3500 by 7 and see it’s 500 per day.

In reality, a lot of calorie stuff is approximate, especially when dealing with cooking raw ingredients. Having exact numbers for calories to fat isn’t going to be too helpful because the natural error in real world stuff is far greater than rounding it for the sake of the reader.