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
It’s just a naming convention to make the numbers more reasonable on food labels, both in terms of size to keep track of and a reasonable degree of confidence in the measurement.
Most people never work with calories outside of the nutritional side, so it’s harmless enough, but those are technically kilocalories.
For a long time the convention was that Calories (capitalized) = kilocalories and lower cade calories was an actual calorie but that kinda went out the window with so many talking about them and not knowing the difference.
Latest Answers