From what I understand, kilo is used for a 1000 units of something. Like kilometer is 1000 meters, kilogram is 1000 gram and so on. But when it comes to the food we consume, when we say coconut water has 18 kilocalorie/100 gm, why does it not mean 18000 calorie in general sense?
In: Physics
In the ‘regular world’, nobody ever talks about calories, it’s such a small amount of energy that it’s just not a useful measurement in most people’s lives, so we save a few syllables by just using Calories.
But in our every day lives we often deal in both meters and kilometers, grams and kilograms. So we use both terms.
For the relative handful of people in the world who need to use the lowercase calories measurement, they can use kilocalories pretty easily to keep their work clear.
It’s not at all unusual for common parlance use of words to be different than how the same words are used in specific fields/industries. Within those disciplines you typically need more specificity than the rest of the world needs, so you use words differently and more carefully.
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