It seems straightforward — if you eat too many calories, or don’t burn enough, then you will get fat. And if you want to slim down, just shovel fewer in and move more.
Unfortunately, however, the truth about calories is nowhere near as simple we have been led to believe, experts insist.
Professor Giles Yeo, a world-renowned geneticist from the and author of Why Calories Don’t Count, explains it best — and urges people to focus on the quality of what they eat, not the little number tucked away on the side of any packaging.
‘We don’t eat calories; we eat food and then our body has to extract the calories,’ he told MailOnline.
Calorie counting also fails to account for the energy it takes to digest food. Protein, although it contains four calories per gram, because of the work needed to digest it, we will only ever extract 70 per cent of those calories, exerts say
Although an apple and a lollipop contain a similar number of calories, the apple is obviously the healthier option as eating too many nutritionally empty calories will soon take it’s toll on your health
Human bodies are ‘not bonfires’ that just burn all calories equally.
For example, we absorb fewer calories from eating an orange segment over drinking its juice — even though they contain exactly the same amount, Professor Yeo says.
‘If you drink orange juice there is no fibre in it, or very little, because we’ve squeezed it out. And our body absorbs the sugar pretty much in minutes.
‘But if you actually eat an orange you have to chew it and it takes time to digest,’ says Professor Yeo.
This, experts in the field argue, is just one example of why it’s so misleading to purely focus on calories.
The basic concept of food as fuel — which sees the body effectively take the role of a furnace — came to light in the 1880s by an American chemist who wanted to know how much ‘energy’ different foods contained.
