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Any thinning process can be summarized by controlling what you eat and exercising. But there is a trap that goes very unnoticed.
"Calorie" If you are currently on a strict diet to lose weight, you probably have nightmares with this word. It's on the lips of the most prestigious nutritionists, in the labeling of the products you eat and in the media that spread tips and tricks on how to lose weight successfully. There are more and more restaurants that include an exact count of them on their plates. New electronic exercise devices, such as mobile phones or smart watches, monitor physical activity and The amount of calories lost.
As a rule, the medical community and the popular acquis agree that if you want to reduce the number you see on the scale By weighing yourself every morning, all you have to do is follow a strict hypocaloric diet and lead an active life. In short, be hungry and exercise a lot, or what is the same, suffers. But to what extent is it true? "Most studies show that over 80% of people recover their lost weight in the long run. And when that happens, a lot of nwe badume that we are not capable of laziness, that we are to blame ", the journalist writes Peter Wilson, in an interesting report published in Econom The Economist '. Like millions of people around the world, he was one of many to feel uncomfortable trying to lose weight in a thousand ways without success.
"It is true that if you consume fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight and if you consume a lot more, you will gain weight," says Wilson. "But calculate the exact caloric content of the food is much more difficult that the precise figures that show so surely on food packaging suggest. Every body treats calories differently. The time of day you eat, for example, is a factor to consider. In the end, the more we try, the more we realize that counting calories will not help us control our weight, or even follow a healthy and balanced diet. The journalist goes through the history of calories to argue that, as in the case of the conspiracy of sugar, many of the truths taken for granted in the fight against obesity are false.
The SAR defines "calorie" as a "unit of thermal energy equivalent to the amount of heat needed to increase the temperature from 1 gram to 1 degree Celsius, from 14.5 to 15.5 degrees at normal pressure. "It is from the 1860s that German scientists began to use it to calculate the amount of energy contained in foods. But on the other side of the puddle, it would be an American agricultural chemist who would begin to introduce the notion of calories to public opinion. Wilbur Olin Atwater wrote a series of very interesting articles in Century 'magazine in 1887 that can be summarized in this curious slogan: "Food is for the body what fuel is for fire."
Thus, he introduced the world to "macronutrients", that is, the carbohydrates, proteins and lipids Content of the food. The most paradoxical is that at that time, these terms had a very different connotation of what they have now. The goal of the chemist was to finish widespread malnutrition in the lowest strata of the population and help the poor to find a much more profitable food to fill and do not be hungry. After many studies, Atwater concluded that one gram of carbohydrate or protein produced on average four calories of energy available in the body, while one gram of fat offered more than double (about 8 , 9 calories).
The times have changed. In 1960, obesity became an urgent social problem because the modern world and the industrialization of the food sector resulted in sedentary lifestyle, processed foods and yes, a lot of sugar. The media spread the importance of fat diets and demonized fats. It is well known that the lobby of the sugar industry, with the financial support of the US government, He extended the idea that the obesity epidemic was a cause of fat, not glucose, which pushed the problem, far from extinction, to continue to grow among the most disadvantaged sections of the population. According to data from the World Health Organization, obesity rates have tripled between 1975 and 2016 in the world. More concretely, 40% of people over the age of 18 are overweight (about 1.9 billion adults).
If the focus was on fats and not on sugar, now is the turn of calories. "Governments around the world continue to offer the same advice: count and reduce calories ", Wilson repeats. "In 2018, the White House ordered food chains to provide details on calories in their menus to help consumers drink."informed and healthy decisions ». On the other hand, the human body is much more complex than an oven. When food is burned in a laboratory, their calories are exhausted in seconds.. On the other hand, the actual life of the food, from the moment it is on the plate until its expulsion from the toilet, takes on average one day, but can vary from 8 to 80 hours, according to the people. One calorie of carbohydrate and another of fat have the same amount of energy stored, so they respond in the same way to the oven, but if you put those same calories in a real human body, the result is very different. "
Source: The confidant
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