Over breakfast, an argument broke out at my house. I eat a high fiber cereal for breakfast. For simple round numbers, let’s say that a serving is 200 calories. The cereal has 10 grams of fiber per serving. (This isn’t the case but it helps make my point).
To the body, fiber has no calories because the body will not absorb it. However, calories are measured by heat put off by the item being measured. Fiber burns.
Again, for the sake of easy numbers, let’s say the fiber burnt and gave off 10 calories per gram. If there are 10 grams of fiber in the cereal, that means fiber would make up 100 calories (10X10), but the body cannot absorb it.
Now the question – the listing on the side of the package states the serving has 200 calories. Does it really in terms of my body? If my hypothesis is correct, then the cereal would only have 100 calories available to my body. The rest is fiber and thus passes right through…and it does.
My wife however, believe the fiber is taken into account and the bowl really has 300 calories (adding 200 to 100) and that the calorie count on the box is what the body can absorb rather than the total number of calories.
Any idea? If I’m right, then I could eat more cereal.
If it’s her, then this is one dense caloric thing I’m putting in my body.
I recently did some research on this topic (I was hoping that not all the calories listed for alcohol were digestible). Anyway, it seems that calories for food are measured using the ‘Atwater system’. My understanding is that calories are found by determining food’s composition (so many grams carbohydrates, so many grams protein, so many grams fat), multiplying those by the known combustive energy, as well as a digestibility factor. It seems that rarely is the number directly derived from burning a bowl of Cheerios.
The total calories per serving is the thing to go by. I’ve never heard of them including calories that aren’t available to the body through digestion, and I can’t imagine that they would. You can double-check it–protein and carbohydrates have 4 cal./gram, fat has 9 cal./gram.
Two things about fiber–there is insoluble fiber, and there is soluble fiber. Your cereal may have both, but it is very seldom broken down that way on the nutrition label. And if there are calories available from any of the fiber, they would be included in the listing, under carbohydrate I believe.
The total calories per serving is the thing to go by. I’ve never heard of them including calories that are not available to the body through digestion, nor leaving some that are, and I can’t imagine that they would. You can double-check it–protein and carbohydrates have 4 cal./gram, fat has 9 cal./gram.
Two things about fiber–there is insoluble fiber, and there is soluble fiber. Your cereal may have both, but it is very seldom broken down that way on the nutrition label. And if there are calories available from any of the fiber, they would be included in the listing, under carbohydrate I believe.
