Best Exercise DVD: Are all calories created equally?
Below is a snippet of a blurb authored by John Kiefer (one of my preferred writers), the complete article can be found at elitefts.com… I greatly recommend the complete column, even though it tends to go over my head at times. John does a good job of applying science to demonstrate how our bodies respond to different calories making calorie counting much more perplexing than the common calories in calories out way of thinking that many persons use.
“The Idea
Given two diets identical in calorie count, the two must produce the same weight loss or gain regardless of macronutrient content.
The Logic
By the 1st law of thermodynamics that says energy is neither created or destroyed, must, somehow, say that 100 calories of carbohydrates will produce identical effects as 100 calories of fat – or protein for that matter.
The Reality
The idea that a calorie is a calorie actually violates the laws of physics and contradicts several well-controlled studies; you can manipulate macronutrients to cause weight-loss even while increasing calories5.
I could go into subjects like Gibb’s free energy, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, triaglycerol synthesis, storage and breakdown, violations of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, entropy and so on and so forth, and if you’re interested you can check the references, as the subjects are well covered. I am, however going to come from the subject from a simpler point, one that most everyone comprehends and deals with daily: efficiency.
This is where the 2nd law of thermodynamics comes into play. The 1st law may be lame, but the 2nd law allows for the concept of efficiency. At its most basic, efficiency is how much work you can get done based on how much energy is put in. A standard internal combustion engine -l ike the one that runs your car – is roughly 33% efficient, which means that one-third of the energy you put in (the chemical energy stored in the gasoline) does work; the other two-thirds is thrown off as heat.
The body works much the same way. On a standard diet of about 60% carbohydrates, the human body also wastes about two-thirds of the ingested energy as heat. A significant amount is used to help hold our internal temperature steady, but some of the energy is lost in other ways as well. The vast majority of research done on humans and animals dealing with efficiency and wasted heat were done within a narrow range of macronutrient combinations with carbs always leading the way at about 55% of the diet or greater.
The physical and physiological fuel values don’t match up for protein either. It takes energy to process the food we eat, energy that’s wasted as heat known as the thermic effect of feeding (TEF). When you eat a meal, you warm up. It’s that simple. There’s an extensive amount of research on the subject: about 2% of the ingested calories of fat, 7% of carbs and 30% of protein is wasted as heat whenever you eat22.
Let’s stop for a second. This is well established fact. There’s no disagreement in the scientific community, amongst pop-diet writers, not even among medical professionals. Knowing this, you can calculate the difference in physiological fuel values between two identical diets. If you took a diet that is 60% carbohydrates, swapped it around so that a much larger percentage of the calories came from protein, you could create two different 2000 calorie diets, one that’s high-carb providing 1850 physiological calories (considering all the heat lost) and one that’s low-carb providing about 1700 physiological calories (even more heat loss). By shuffling things around, we cut 150 usable calories per day while still putting 2000 calories into our mouths.
I’m going to say what is hopefully obvious at this point: being inefficient is good if you love food. If you can make your body inefficient, you can eat more and actually lose weight. My different dieting strategies-Carb Nite? and Carb Back-LoadingT-both depend on manipulating TEF and other factors to make the body as inefficient as possible at the right times. Take Carb Nite for example: the diet is refined to the point that each time you consume carbs during the specified window of time, your body almost literally cannot store the carbs as fat, and works so hard trying to process them that it releases a ton of heat, you start sweating and the vascularity on your forearms doubles as a satellite map of the Amazon delta. All of these effects depend on enzyme activity and hormone levels, all of which can be manipulated by the food we eat.
A calorie is not a calorie: end of story. The whole argument is essentially one of laziness and ignorance. Our latest dietary iconoclasts accept one set of facts, but refuse to accept another set of facts (yes, it’s a fact that you can make your body more or less efficient, that a calorie is not a calorie, so to speak). A calorie is not a calorie is a direct consequence of the accepted facts. Maybe we’re not taught to think logically anymore, to understand cause-and-effect because truthfully, the conclusion that a calorie is not a calorie could be reached by any four-year-old who’s learned to play connect-the-dots.”
As you can appreciate, John does an excellent job of proving his point in this feature! Calorie consumption is an beneficial factor in losing weight but it is much more complicated than many individuals know.
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