Calorie counts: fatally flawed, or our best defense against pudge?

Eat 200 calories of baby carrots, and you're going to be doing a lot more chomping than if you eat 200 calories of gummy bears. Any dieter can tell you that. So can a 200-calorie photo

shoot that's making the rounds on the Internet this week. But when it comes to losing or maintaining weight, a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, right? Maybe not. Just as the federal

government is getting ready to launch a nationwide requirement for posted calorie counts in restaurants, some scientists are mounting an assault on the century-old system for measuring the

calories, saying it doesn't accurately measure the energy people get from food. To be clear, "we think food labels are a good idea," says Rachel Carmody, a postdoc at Harvard

University who studies how cooking and processing changes food energy. "We just want to make sure that the information communicated is as accurate as possible." The current

standard, called the Atwater system after the USDA scientist who invented it, assigns carbohydrates and proteins 4 kilocalories of energy per gram, and fat 9 kilocalories per gram. (A

kilocalorie is a measure of energy equal to 1 Calorie, people.) But it doesn't assign any calorie value to fiber, for example, so people eating whole grains are consuming more calories

than they realize. Carmody helped organize a symposium in Boston Monday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting, which chewed over some of the big

beefs that she and other researchers have with calorie counts, based on new research. Among their points of contention: * It's much easier for the body to extract nutrients from cooked

and processed foods than from whole or raw foods. People get more energy per ounce out of cooked hamburger than they would from a raw steak. * Refined carbohydrates – foods with a high

glycemic index — make people hungrier sooner than an equivalent calorie amount of whole grains, encouraging overeating. * Some foods, like almonds, deliver a lot fewer calories than they

contain, probably because we don't chew them enough to fracture all the cell walls and release fats. * Calorie counts don't account for the 5 to 30 percent of energy used up in

digesting and absorbing a meal. The fact that these variations aren't reflected in calorie counts make work harder for scientists who actually study this stuff, Carmody says, and could

leave consumers falsely reassured by package labels. "We're not recommending that people not pay attention to food labels," Carmody told The Salt. Instead, she hopes that

people "realize that something that's more highly processed is going to represent more calories than in a less-processed form." [embedded content] But don't think you can

throw away your dogeared 1990s calorie counter guide just yet. Calorie counts still have many fierce partisans among nutritionists and public health officials, who say the bottom line is

still all about how much you put in your mouth. One is Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health, and author of the 2012 book " Why Calories Count."

Despite the inaccuracies in the Atwater system, she says, when it comes to obesity, the biggest problem is that people are eating too much. "One point is clear," she recently

wrote. "Larger portions have more calories. The easiest way to prevent weight gain is to eat less by choosing smaller portions, fewer snacks and healthier meals in general." That

said, it would be nice if posted calorie counts were accurate. As filmmaker Casey Neistat recently found out, that's often not the case. Neistat took some of his favorite New York City

foods to a laboratory at the New York Obesity Nutrition Research Center for testing. Four out of the five items tested had more calories than the label promised. The Subway turkey sandwich

was the only one to contain fewer calories, while a "healthy" tofu sandwich from another outlet had almost twice as many calories as listed. (Check out his charming " calorie

detective" video, which we've embedded above, for the whole scoop.) Expect to hear more soon from Rachel Carmody and her fellow partisans, as they build the case against the

hegemony of the calorie. Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.