Are calories in fat worse and harder to burn than calories from carbohydrates?
From: Larry DeLuca, EdM, CSCS The difference isn’t in how the calories are “burned” so much as in how excess calories are stored. Excess carbohydrate calories must be converted to triglycerides before they can be stored as body fat. This process requires over 25% of the energy stored in the food. Thus, if you took in 100 Calories of pure carbohydrate in excess of your body’s needs, you’d only store about 75 Calories worth of fat, since you used up some of the energy in the conversion process. Fat, on the other hand, is fat to begin with. It only takes about 3% of the energy in it to put it up on the larder shelf, as it were. Thus, 100 Calories from fat in excess of your body’s needs can end up as 97 Calories worth of saddlebag. Remember that we take in nutrients of all sorts together, though – fats, carbs, and proteins. Thus, the most important factor over time is generally the total number of calories. However, if you keep the number of calories in your diet exactly the same and switc
