Some incredibly silly preoccupations, and the fatuous questions they engender, simply refuse to die. Is evolution really real? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Is a calorie a calorie? Recent, prominent attention to the challenges of sustainable weight loss has that last one making the rounds of pseudo-intellectual discourse again, so let’s take it on.
[See: 7 Diet Mistakes Sabotaging Your Weight Loss.]
Consider, for starters, that you have three bottles, each exactly one liter. The first is filled with pure water; the second, with soda; the third, with methanol. Drink the first, and you will not trigger an insulin release. Drink the second, and you will trigger exactly that. Drink the third, and you will almost certainly go blind and possibly die. Therefore, a liter is not a liter.
Not there yet? OK, onward.
Consider that the final 5,280 feet to the summit of Mount Everest is a mile. So, too, is some peregrination through Central Park. However, since breathing and keeping all of your toes would be much tougher on the mountain than in the park, a mile is, clearly, not a mile.
What a load of utter, useless rubbish.
We have never been so benighted to think that as long as we knew it was a “liter,” a liter of what wouldn’t matter. Frankly, I know quite a few nincompoops, but none that silly. We have never been so obtuse as to think that as long as it was a mile, a mile where couldn’t add any further useful information.
I am not sure what or whose agenda it serves, but the idea that there was ever a choice to make between what number of calories and calories of what is equally absurd. Consider that studies of calorie restriction have produced real, relevant and replicable results pertaining to everything from metabolic activity to gene expression. These are studies of … calorie restriction. Not food volume; not diet composition. When other factors are held steady, changes in calories produce changes in outcomes. Yes, really. Even “good foods” can cause weight gain when the dose, measured in calories, is excessive. Bad foods, when the quantity — again, measured in calories — is restricted, still allow for weight loss.
[See: Surprise! These 12 ‘Unhealthy’ Foods Have Health Benefits.]
But, hold the phone. Calories are not the only thing that matters! What a stunner. On comparable numbers of calories, diets of varying composition produce markedly different metabolic outcomes, too. Changes in diet composition can also influence gene expression. In other words, calories from what also matters.
Back to our liter bottles. Imagine if we decided that since the contents obviously do matter, volume cannot. I have bad news: The kidneys capacity to dilute or concentrate solute is impressive, but limited. The standard range — for those who care about such things — is approximately 50 to 1,200 milliosmoles per liter of urine. Since the “average” adult must excrete about 600 milliosmoles of water-soluble waste each day, that means urine volume can range from about a half liter (under conditions of extreme dehydration) to 12 liters.
So, what if, in the land of “since the beverage matters, the volume can’t,” you drank 27 liters of that pure water? Or 35? Or 53? Well, you would develop varying degrees of hyponatremia, a dilution of the sodium in your blood because your kidneys could not handle that volume. You would proceed — barring the timely interruption of your experiment — to get very loopy, and then have seizures, and then die. An odd condition called psychogenic polydipsia involves water ingestion beyond physiologic tolerance, and is associated with just such unhappy outcomes.
So, actually, both the volume of beverage containers, and the beverages they contain, can and do matter at the same time, in the same world. If ever there was an epiphany, this sure as hell isn’t it. This rises, and barely, to the level of: duh. Exactly the same is true of calories. The measure itself matters, and is meaningful — but it only pertains to what it measures. The source of the calories encompasses a whole array of other vitally usefully information.
One final point: Imagine if methanol — in addition to causing blindness, seizures, coma and possibly death — first caused you to crave more methanol (to my knowledge, it does not). Well, then the very fact that there was methanol in the first liter would be the reason you drank the second. Actually, while that probably isn’t true of methanol, it is true of soda, since the copious amount of sugar it contain does stimulate appetite. So, the first bottle may very well be the reason for the second.
That is true of calories in general, and it’s a truth at the confluence of quantity and quality. The quality of foods providing the calories reverberates through our metabolism and nervous system, with major implications for how many calories it takes to feel full. In other words, the relevance of food quality does not obviate the relevance of quantity, but rather plays a direct role in determining it. This is the very story brilliantly told to us by Michael Moss and, although few seemed to be listening, by others before him.
[See: The 10 Best Diets for Healthy Eating.]
If you are convinced that the volume of the bottle doesn’t matter if the contents do, or vice versa, then you may be interested in the answer to: How many calories are in a serving of nonsense? The rest of us know there is no meaningful answer to so pointless a question.
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Is a Calorie a Calorie? originally appeared on usnews.com
