Why calories are bad

Evolution favored fruits that were both tasty and easy to digest to better attract animals that could help plants scatter seeds. It also favored nuts and seeds that were hard to digest, however. After all, seeds and nuts need to survive the guts of birds, bats, rodents and monkeys to spread the genes they contain.

Studies suggest that peanuts, pistachios and almonds are less completely digested than other foods with similar levels of proteins, carbohydrates and fats, meaning they relinquish fewer calories than one would expect. A new study by Janet A. Novotny and her colleagues at the U. Department of Agriculture found that when people eat almonds, they receive just calories per serving rather than the calories reported on the label.

They reached this conclusion by asking people to follow the same exact diets—except for the amount of almonds they ate—and measuring the unused calories in their feces and urine. Even foods that have not evolved to survive digestion differ markedly in their digestibility. Proteins may require as much as five times more energy to digest as fats because our enzymes must unravel the tightly wound strings of amino acids from which proteins are built.

Yet food labels do not account for this expenditure. Some foods such as honey are so readily used that our digestive system is hardly put to use. They break down in our stomach and slip quickly across the walls of our intestines into the bloodstream: game over.

Finally, some foods prompt the immune system to identify and deal with any hitchhiking pathogens. No one has seriously evaluated just how many calories this process involves, but it is probably quite a few. A somewhat raw piece of meat can harbor lots of potentially dangerous microbes.

Even if our immune system does not attack any of the pathogens in our food, it still uses up energy to take the first step of distinguishing friend from foe. This is not to mention the potentially enormous calorie loss if a pathogen in uncooked meat leads to diarrhea. What's Cooking? When studying the feeding behavior of wild chimpanzees, biologist Richard Wrangham, now at Harvard University, tried eating what the chimps ate.

He went hungry and finally gave in to eating human foods. He has come to believe that learning to process food—cooking it with fire and pounding it with stones—was a milestone of human evolution. Emus do not process food; neither, to any real extent, do any of the apes. Yet every human culture in the world has technology for modifying its food. We grind, we heat, we ferment. When humans learned to cook food—particularly, meat—they would have dramatically increased the number of calories they extracted from that food.

Wrangham proposes that getting more energy from food allowed humans to develop and nourish exceptionally large brains relative to body size. But no one had precisely investigated, in a controlled experiment, how processing food changes the energy it provides—until now.

Rachel N. Carmody, a former graduate student in Wrangham's lab, and her collaborators fed adult male mice either sweet potatoes or lean beef. She served these foods raw and whole, raw and pounded, cooked and whole, or cooked and pounded and allowed the mice to eat as much as they wanted for four days.

Mice lost around four grams of weight on raw sweet potatoes but gained weight on cooked potatoes, pounded and whole. Similarly, the mice retained one gram more of body mass when consuming cooked meat rather than raw meat.

This reaction makes biological sense. Heat hastens the unraveling, and thus the digestibility, of proteins, as well as killing bacteria, presumably reducing the energy the immune system must expend to battle any pathogens. Carmody's findings also apply to industrial processing. Even if two people eat the same sweet potato or piece of meat cooked the same way, they will not get the same number of calories out of it.

Carmody and her colleagues studied inbred mice with highly similar genetics. Yet the mice still varied in terms of how much they grew or shrank on a given diet. People differ in nearly all traits, including inconspicuous features, such as the size of the gut. Measuring people's colons has not been popular for years, but when it was the craze among European scientists in the early s, studies discovered that certain Russian populations had large intestines that were about 57 centimeters longer on average than those of certain Polish populations.

Protein puts fat loss on autopilot 12 , Increased protein can lead to drastically reduced appetite and cause automatic weight loss without the need for calorie counting or portion control. Different foods have different effects on satiety. This means some foods will give you a greater feeling of fullness. This is a key example of how the food choices you make can have a huge impact on the total calories you end up consuming.

There are many factors that determine the satiety value of different foods, which is measured on a scale called the satiety index The satiety index is a measure of the ability of foods to reduce hunger, increase feelings of fullness and reduce calorie intake for the next few hours. If you eat foods that are low on the satiety index, then you will be hungrier and end up eating more.

If you choose foods that are high on the satiety index, you will end up eating less and losing weight. Examples of foods that are high on the satiety index are boiled potatoes, beef, eggs, beans and fruits.

Foods that are low on the index include donuts and cakes. Clearly, whether or not you choose foods that are filling will have a major impact on your energy balance in the long term.

Different foods have different effects on satiety and how many calories you end up consuming in subsequent meals. This is measured on a scale called the satiety index. Since the year , over 20 randomized controlled trials have compared low-carb and low-fat diets. The results consistently show that low-carb diets lead to more weight loss than low-fat diets, often 2—3 times as much.

One of the main reasons for this is that low-carb diets lead to drastically reduced appetite. People start eating fewer calories without trying 16 , The biggest reason for this is probably that low-carb diets also cause significant water loss. Excess bloat tends to go away in the first week or two Moreover, low-carb diets tend to include more protein than low-fat diets.

Protein takes energy to metabolize and the body expends energy turning protein into glucose Low-carb diets consistently lead to more weight loss than low-fat diets, even when calories are matched between groups. But one of the few things that almost everyone agrees on is that refined carbs are bad. This includes added sugars like sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup, as well as refined grain products like white bread.

Refined carbohydrates tend to be low in fiber and are digested and absorbed quickly, leading to rapid spikes in blood sugar. They have a high glycemic index GI , which is a measure of how quickly foods raise blood sugar. When you eat a food that spikes blood sugar fast, it tends to lead to a crash in blood sugar a few hours later.

When that happens, you get cravings for another high-carb snack. One study served people milkshakes identical in every respect except that one had high-GI and the other low-GI carbs.

The high-GI milkshake caused increased hunger and cravings compared to the low-GI shake Therefore, the speed at which carb calories hit the system can have a dramatic effect on their potential to cause overeating and weight gain. The fiber can reduce the rate at which the glucose enters your system 25 , Studies consistently show that people who eat the most high-GI foods are at the greatest risk of becoming obese and diabetic.

Most flavors are only about calories so cutting calories to meet your goal is super easy and really tasty too. Those calories still count. Many good calories come from high-calorie and even high-fat foods. The key is the ratio of calorie count to nutritional value. Good calories are those that provide lean-protein, healthy-fats and complex carbs from fresh whole foods and quality meal replacements and supplements.

These come from things like processed foods, sugar, refined flours, unhealthy fats and artificial ingredients. Processed, refined and high-sugar foods wreak havoc on the hormones that control weight loss, weight gain, fat metabolism, mood and hunger. Because of this, you can eat a calorie diet and not only not lose weight but gain it if most of those 1, calories are bad calories. Not only are these foods unhealthy, they make it hard to stick to your calorie goal for the day. A calorie serving of fresh vegetables is a lot more food than a calorie serving of chips.

More food in your stomach means you feel fuller, longer and you can stay on track. Make sense? For a more in depth explanation and to see exactly what calories looks like, check out the video below:. Bad calorie foods will leave you feeling hungry soon after forcing you to either go hungry and eventually quit your diet or overeat in order to get your fill.

Focus on eating lean protein like chicken or fish , healthy fats like olive oil or coconut oil , and complex carbs like brown rice or quinoa. They have protein, carbs, fat, vitamins, and minerals. When you think in terms of good calories vs bad calories things can get confusing.