What are calories? Is it the amount if energy in a food? How does the body uses calories, burns calories, and how does excess calories becomes fat?
Why are food “low in calories” good for you? Why are food of the same size, have different amount if calories?
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A calorie is the amount of energy required to increase the temperature of one ml of water by one degree Celsius.
When you start talking dietary calories you’re actually talking about kilocalories. Which means one dietary calorie is actually 1000 calories in the scientific sense.
Calories are one way to measure how much energy your body is outputting. For example walking a mile on flat ground for the average person takes about 50 dietary calories. Being alive takes calories too, with the *average* person burning about 1300 calories just by being alive for 24 hours. Now there’s a lot of variation to all of these which is why I say average. If you’re big and weigh a lot then obviously it takes more energy to move you. So you’d burn more calories from exercise than a small person. Exactly how many is next to impossible to determine precisely but these exercise guides that tell you doing x at y weight burns z calories are all a ballpark number.
There’s also calories in food. If we talk the raw chemical energy food has insane amounts of energy. But obviously we don’t convert food to energy at 100% efficiency. Pee and poop are food stuffs that haven’t been converted to energy. Everybody’s guts are different and extract a different amount of energy from food. The amount of energy that’s able to be extracted from food is called bioavailability. There is an average that everyone is near. So when you see an apple is 60 calories that means an apple has 60 calories bioavaila ible to the average person. Some people it might be 55 some people it might be 65. But it’s *around* 60.
Obviously produce isn’t 100% uniform. Each apple is different just like each person so it’s all a close estimate.
None is exact, but it’s all pretty close.
Anyway how this all relates to fat is that your body will use excess calories and turn them into fat, hair, muscle, etc.
Being able to pack on fat *was* a great thing. Evolutionarily. Because up until about 100-150 years ago it was just a fact of life that sometimes there wouldn’t enough food. And if you didn’t have any fat on your body you might starve. But in our modern lives of abundance we eat too much and it becomes a problem.
There’s something to be said about nutritional needs vs caloric needs. So cheap food might meet your caloric needs but not all your vitamin needs and so despite having too many calories you could still have health problems related to not eating enough of the correct stuff. But that’s a whole other bag of worms.
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