What Are Calories?
Calories reside in almost 100% of the foods that we eat. Even evil-tasting rice cakes contain calories – but you sure wouldn’t think they would. Anything that tastes like cardboard shouldn’t contain calories, but yes they do indeedy. Calories is simply another fancy word for ‘energy’. The body needs the calories in the foods we eat to use as energy. Without calories, we wouldn’t feel like going out and having fun at the mall on those days when we call in sick to work.
For years I have heard about Calories. To lose weight I knew that I had to burn calories and eat fewer of them. But just what is a calorie? Thinking long and hard about it I recall a science experiment I performed in high school which involved melting ice, but honestly I couldn’t answer the question. So I did some quick research and low and behold calories are really simple little things! They simply represent energy.
Calories are contained in most of the foods we eat and it is something that many diets and ‘lose weight fast plans’ have focused on. It has only been in recent times that food producers have had to be more honest about the amount of calories in their foods. We are obsessed with calories and they are the one aspect of food that we count. We count how many we consume and less frequently we count how many we use. We talk quite confidently about calories but do we really know what they are all about? What is a calorie? A calorie is simply a unit measure of energy, also known as a joule. They are both used to measure the amount of energy in our food. 1 calorie is approximately equal to 4.2 kJ (kilo joules). The majority of times you see calories mentioned in the same breath as a food it is actually referring to kilocalories (kcal) which is actually a kilogram calorie which is (surprise surprise – Beeble) the equivalent of 1000 gram calories. So from a scientific point of view a calorie or k
