What is the Difference Between a Dietary Calorie and Physics Calorie?
In both physics and nutrition, a calorie is a unit of energy measurement. The dietary Calorie is based on the physics calorie, but it has a more limited, specific application and is not used as precisely. In physics, there are two types of calorie: a gram calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius, while a kilogram calorie is the amount of energy needed to increase the temperature of a kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. The dietary calorie is based on the latter measurement in physics. In physics, the term calorie is only used to refer to the gram calorie, while the dietary Calorie is really a kilogram calorie, or kilocalorie, 1,000 times larger than a physics calorie. (The dietary calorie should be written as Calorie, with a capital “C”.) This is only one way in which the two differ. Dietary Calories are also much more approximate in nature than physics calories. The idea behind a dietary calorie is that the body mu
