A Calorie is Not a Calorie
A calorie, by definition, is simply a unit of energy. It’s a way of describing the amount of energy a person gets from consuming something. Calories not used by the body get stored as fat. In theory, there are roughly 3,500 calories in a pound of fat.
But, did you know that different calories metabolize (the way the body processes foods) differently in the body? And, some calories can even cause disease more than others!
Additionally, not all fat cells are the same. It sounds unfair, but some people can produce more fat cells as they store fat. Some of us even will get bigger fat cells, not just more of them. These enlarged fat cells can compound metabolic dysfunction. This phenomenon may explain why some people develop metabolic problems like high cholesterol or diabetes when they gain weight and others don’t.
Even without considering how our bodies can metabolize calories differently, all calories are not equal when it comes to how the body processes them.
You can look at a serving of bread, for example. It’s about 120 calories. Most of that (80%) gets used by the body; the rest goes to the liver, where hormones take care of metabolizing much, but not all of what’s left. During this process, the brain signals to the body that it’s full and that it is time to stop eating.
Looking at the same metabolic process using, say, 120 calories of alcohol, most of those calories go straight to the liver, without the benefit of feeling full, not to mention a myriad of adverse effects on the body. So that’s a straightforward example of how a calorie is not a calorie. Most of us have probably experienced for ourselves how two different calorie sources can make us feel differently.
We can further look at how the body metabolizes sugar. That bread serving gets turned into glucose. But when the sugar comes in the form of sucrose, 120 calories of orange juice, for example, half the calories are glucose and processed as such. The other half, fructose, processes in a way that bypasses insulin production. This means that our liver has to work harder to process the fructose, thus creating more uric acid, contributing to diseases like gout and hypertension. Yikes, all from an innocent-looking glass of orange juice!
Don’t even get me started on high fructose corn syrup…
My point is that all calories are NOT created equal. This is why it makes me crazy when many in the medical community use the tired old paradigm of calories in/calories out, as though all calories are the same!
I don’t expect my patients to follow the intricacies of how different calories break down chemically in the body, but educating them on how different foods affect them is paramount in understanding how to improve their health. Helping people understand that what they eat, rather than just the calorie count of what they are eating, impacts their overall health and their ability to lose weight.
A big piece of the journey to long-term and lasting success in reaching your health goals is being empowered with good information so you can regularly make good choices. That is why our programs include nutritional counseling and other ongoing health education to ensure you are getting all the info you need to make great choices about which calories to limit and which to choose.