Die, Calorie, Die!
If you have looked at any of the recipes on this site, you may notice there are no caloric tallies. This is not an oversight but rather by design. In an effort to help people become the healthiest versions of themselves, I want to kill the calorie. Yes, I really just said “kill the calorie.” There is so much more to metabolic health than “energy balance” and our obsession with calories has not made us any healthier nor leaner. In its wake, the reduced calorie diet has left us hungry, defeated, confused, depressed, and often heavier and sicker.
Our fixation with calories is rooted in a misunderstanding of how the body metabolizes various types of foods with the presumption that all calories are created equal. Conventional dietary advice clings to the energy balance model which holds that by balancing a math equation, with calories on one side and energy expenditure on the other, body weight will be maintained.
calories in = calories out
Further, this model holds that creating a caloric deficit by simply reducing calories and/or increasing energy expenditure, body weight will be lost. In other words, it matters very little what you eat, as long as you don’t eat too much of it. And if you eat too much, go burn it off with exercise.
If only the human body worked in such simplistic, neat, mathematical terms, every reduced-calorie diet would be a success! There are three major problems with the energy balance model:
Humans are not bomb calorimeters. What the heck is a bomb calorimeter? I am so glad you asked! It is a device used to measure the heat energy released, aka “kilocalories,” by burning an organic substance. The calorie was born in 1916 when agriculturist Wilbur Atwater used a bomb calorimeter to report that proteins and carbohydrates release 4 kcal per gram and fats release 9 kcal per gram. If you enter a jalapeño eating contest, you might feel as if your digestive system is operating using fire and heat release, however under normal human conditions, the GI tract and metabolic processes are far more complex than Atwater’s calorimeter (Novotny, et al, 2012).
Many factors influence how we burn the food we eat. Human metabolism is a highly nuanced series of biochemical reactions designed to extract nutrients and create energy. Some of us do this more efficiently than others. Genetics, age, gender, hormones, stress, sleep, activity level, and lean muscle tissue all influence these processes. Even a deficiency in a critical nutrient, enzyme or hormone can dramatically affect metabolism. For example, a deficiency in carnitine or B5 can impair fat metabolism, (Longo, et al, 2016), or an individual with untreated Type 1 diabetes could be losing weight on 5,000 calories a day because in the absence of insulin, cells cannot utilize energy.
All calories are not created equal. Proteins, fats and carbohydrates are broken down in different parts of the digestive system using various enzymes. Different foods behave differently in the body. By comparison, 250 calories of broccoli does not behave the same inside the body as 250 calories of Skittles. Both are technically carbohydrates, but only one nourishes the body. The other is poison. Absorption rates of these “calories” are influenced by their fiber or fat content, and the individual’s metabolic ability to breakdown a particular substrate. Plus, some of the fiber-rich calories we eat actually feed the billions of gut bacteria living in our GI tract known as our microbiome (Sonnerburg & Bäckhed, 2016).
But what about all the scientific evidence on weight loss and restricted calorie diets? I’m so glad you brought that up! Yes, it is true that calorie restriction can and often leads to weight loss. But at what cost? And in what environment? And for how long? If people on reduced-calorie diets could be locked up in metabolic wards, as they often are for research studies, without the temptations, stressors and time constraints of the real world, then, yes, calorie restriction can work. Keep in mind that metabolic wards generally don’t offer donuts or anything from the Cheesecake Factory’s menu.
One of the major reasons we are overeating is because we are eating the wrong types of foods. Ultra-processed foods which are devoid of fiber and nutrients now comprise the preponderance of our modern diet. The food industry has designed these foods to be highly palatable so that you consume more. Many would argue that processed foods can also be addictive. Food is information for the body. Ultra-processed foods affect not only our waistlines, but can raise our blood sugar, promote cardiovascular disease, alter levels of neurotransmitters, and suppress our satiety hormones. If we want to improve our health, we need to change the types of food that we eat. We need to eat real food.
When we look at the healthiest cultures in the world, such as the five Blue Zones where people enjoy the longest health-spans and largely see their hundredth birthday, none of these people count calories. On the Nicoyan Peninsula of Costa Rica, they are not ruminating on how many carbs are in their tortillas, nor are the Okinawans concerned with entering their fresh catch into My Fitness Pal. There are no chicken nuggets in the Blue Zones, or drive-thru meals eaten in cars on the way to somewhere, or pop tarts given to children for breakfast. While their diets are vastly different from each other, what they share is a diet of real food (Kreouzi, et al, 2022). Real foods include anything that came out of the ground, from the animals that ate the stuff out of the ground, or foods that came from the ocean. Real foods require little to no processing and work with the body’s metabolism to provide adequate nutrition, energy, and satiety. While calorie counting introduces tedium to the diet, seeking out real, nutrient-rich foods can leave you feeling fuller sooner, making it less likely you will overeat.
There are exceptions when counting calories can be useful or even necessary. An extremely sick person receiving parenteral or enteral nutrition (tube feeding) requires a qualified dietician to ensure they receive proper nutrients and calories. A malnourished individual, whether it is due to illness, an eating disorder, or medication side effects, can use caloric and macronutrient goals to achieve their ideal weight. Body builders attempting to add more lean muscle to their body often add calories and tweak macronutrients in their diet. Of course clinical trials use isocaloric diets between study subjects for the sake of scientific accuracy.
For long term weight management in the real world, counting calories has not worked for most people. We have better methods, better scientific data, and better real world examples of metabolically healthy people. None of this involves living inside a caloric math equation. Traditional dietary advice preaches that a calorie is a calorie and that is a hill many clinicians have chosen to die on. I say let’s switch back to real food and kill the calorie instead.
References:
Kreouzi M, Theodorakis N, Constantinou C. Lessons Learned From Blue Zones, Lifestyle Medicine Pillars and Beyond: An Update on the Contributions of Behavior and Genetics to Wellbeing and Longevity. American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine. 2022;0(0). doi:10.1177/15598276221118494
Longo N, Frigeni M, Pasquali M. Carnitine transport and fatty acid oxidation. Biochim Biophys Acta. 2016;1863(10):2422-2435. doi:10.1016/j.bbamcr.2016.01.023
Novotny JA, Gebauer SK, Baer DJ. Discrepancy between the Atwater factor predicted and empirically measured energy values of almonds in human diets. Am J Clin Nutr. 2012;96(2):296-301. doi:10.3945/ajcn.112.035782
Sonnenburg, J., Bäckhed, F. Diet–microbiota interactions as moderators of human metabolism. Nature 535, 56–64 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature18846
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