It’s a conspiracy by the alien Visitors. By making it seem like there are fewer calories in food than there really are, they’re encouraging us to eat more, thus fattening us up for the future harvest. The scary thing is that it’s working. Just look around…
Er, pound is standardly a unit of mass, not force. Pound can also be used to denote force, but “Pound-Force” or “Pound-mass” should be used as appropriate for clarity where it is needed.
Well, we really only order “pints” in fancy brew pubs. Heck, we don’t even use the word “pub” unless we’re talking about fancy brew pubs. Anyway, a British and Canadian pint is 19.2 US ounces.
See it would be very different if you wanted the the foot-pound police. They are all out on paid disability leave, watching TV and eating doughnuts.
I suppose it worked OK when writing. But calorie and Calorie are pronounced exactly the same way, right? So whenever scientists actually talked about this stuff, wouldn’t they have to say “small-c calorie” just so the other person could be sure they weren’t using “Calorie” to mean “kilocalorie”?
As with most words calorie has a variety of meanings. You have to pick the specific meaning from context. If it is used in the context of food it is kilocalories. If for some reason you need to talk about the amount of energy in food and relate it to non food calculations you need to be more explicit or risk misunderstandings.
Hopefully, someone in the future will use Search and find this thread the next time this often-asked question arises.
I was able to find no definitive reference to first documented use of the term calorie to mean “kilocalorie”, so I set off scanning through numerous works, both online and off (Cecil wanted me to look into it). The earliest use I was able to find was in W.O. Atwater’s “The Chemical Composition of American Food Materials”, published in 1896 as the United States Department of Agriculture Bulletin, Number 28. Starting on Page 11, he gives a huge list of the energy content of 2,600 food items, all listed in terms of “calories per pound”, referring to “kilocalories”. This use was confirmed in a later work by Atwater and Bryant in 1900.
Atwater, who was a professor at Wesleyan University and later the first director of the USDA Office of Experiment Stations, is described by several texts as being the “father of modern American nutrition”, and he published numerous works on the subject from the middle of the 1800’s to the early 1900’s. It seemed likely to me as I went through similar papers and publications in the 1910’s-1930’s that many based their works on Atwater’s, and thus may have carried his usage forward. This is informed speculation on my part, not proven, however.
It is possible that earlier researchers in this field used the word “calorie” to mean “kilocalorie” with respect to foodstuff (such as Justus von Liebig, J. Konig, and Jenkins and Winton) but if so no resources I could actually get my hands on had this usage. It was said that sometime in the 1880’s at least a couple of the guys I list had done so, but the texts were 1) in German, and 2) unavailable to me.
Atwater, W.O. and Woods, Chas D. “The Chemical Composition of American Food Materials.” USDA Bulletin Number 28, 1896.
Scientists never talk about calories - either big or little C. They talk joules.
Also, metrified nations don’t talk calories in food either. All our food is labelled in kilojoules. On the other hand, the world is still clinging to calories, and so one gets pretty used to doing the conversion. My indoor rower insists on displaying energy dissipated in calories. We still get the silly effect where people talk about thousands of kilojoules. Really no different to distances being quoted in thousands of kilometers I guess. But when I say that the distance between Adelaide and Sydney is 1.4 megametres, I get a funny look. 
Although a 9 megajoule per day diet isn’t quite so misunderstood.
What, what?!
I can only imagine American pints are actually gallons or something…
Well I know US ounces aren’t like Dutch ounces (which are 100 grams) (by the way: are those fluid ounces?), and a British pint is slighly less than 500 ml. So how much is 19.2 US (whatever-)ounces in SI units?
An American pint is 16 ounces, rather than the 20 ounce Imperial pint.
Thanks. For the interested, according to google:
1 Imperial pint = 568.261485 ml = 20 Imperial fluid ounces (so actually more than I thought)
1 US pint = 473.176473 ml = 16.6534768 Imperial fluid ounces
So do dieters count their calories or their joules or their kilojoules?
In Mexico the cloned-from-America nutrition labels all indicate “kcal” for energy content. My bottle of mineral water does also indicate kJ, though.
Calories or kilojoules. But it is a generational thing. Foods are in kilojoules, so most people do it in kilojoules. I do. Personally I divide the day into 9 one megajoule portions. Breakfast is 2, lunch 2 or 3, and so on. But most people talk in thousands of kilojoules for food and diet. I’m just bloody minded about correct use of the multiplier 
My parents do Calories.