Let’s say you want to be in a caloric surplus and you struggle to reach 2500kcal per day.
You manage to eat maybe 1500 calories through healthy and diverse food and maybe even use a vitamin supplement to get all the vitamins and minerals you could possibly need. You also get some 100 grams or so of protein that’s recommended.
…however you’re still 1000 calories short in order to be in caloric surplus.
If you used “empty calories” like soda in order to fill out the remaining calories, would you actually reach the goal or not? You already have all the vitamins, minerals and proteins that you need, so you just need the energy from those 1000 calories…could empty calories give you that?
Basically are empty calories called that way just because they aren’t healthy and don’t offer minerals and vitamins, or because they don’t have energy?
“calorie” is a measure of the energy. So yes, that would work.
When i had chickenpox, and couldn’t eat due to pox down my throat, the pediatrician told my mom to give me hard candy to suck on. She said, “i thought candy wasn’t good for children?”, and the the doctor told her the most important things were that we got enough water and calories. So we lived on broth and hard candy for a week.
If you want a real-life example of what you can add to make up calories, I looked at “A Modern Sledging Ration” (1958). Their goal is to provide lots of calories while keeping the gross weight of the crates down.
Besides supplements like cod liver oil, dried yeast powder, lime juice, and salt pills, the prototype ration had
Weight (oz)
calories
meat bar
5
810
butter
4
900
potato block
0.5
78
cocoa
0.75
96
chocolate
4
656
sugar
3
336
rolled oats or oatmeal bar
2.5
314
dried milk
1.75
263
biscuits
4
556
soup powder
1.25
125
dried onions
0.5
—
tea powder
0.17
—
salt
0.08
—
cheese
1
145
Nescafe
0.06
96
Marmite
0.1
—
Complan
1.5
190
Sweets
2
224
and compare an older-school one
pemmican
8
1272
margarine
8
1808
biscuits
4
516
pea flour
2
156
milk powder
2
300
Plasmon oats
3
345
sugar
4
448
cocoa
1
128
milk chocolate
3
492
Horlicks powder
0.5
57
Some of the stuff is there for palatability/variety, but you can see they do throw in cookies, chocolate, sugar, etc. but also lots of fat and protein.
The term usually means things that have ample energy but little nutritional value. Many tasty snack foods would be in this category, and people tend to get more of their energy from these foods than they would guess - writing down what and how much you eat makes this plain.
It does not mean foods which are mainly water or are otherwise low in energy.
The human body has adapted over thousands of years to make maximal use of whatever is available. It does well on many types of diets and so people dogmatic about specific specialty diets usually overestimate their value. However, some foods are obviously healthier than others and wise people eat delicious but doubtful snacks less often and in smaller quantities.
When I was working in a supermarket garden center, I was burning well over 3000 calories a day. No matter how much I ate, I kept losing weight. Kinda cool at first, but after a while, started getting a bit worrisome.
So, empty calories sometimes means cheap calories. I started eating “unhealthy” and my weight stabilized.
I agree with @Dr_Paprika that in common usage it means they have ample energy but little else. A perfect example would be that in the OP - sugary soda. Carbohydrate with high glycemic index and nothing else.
I think it’s a useful term, since for people with a sedentary lifestyle, consuming large amounts of carbohydrate with high glycemic index is a significant health risk - glucose spikes, risk of Type II diabetes etc. The caveat is that there’s nothing intrsinsically unhealthy with this kind of food in all contexts. When we say that carbs have high glycemic index, that’s saying that they are easy to digest and release a rapid burst of energy, whereas carbs with low glycemic index or fats or proteins are more difficult to digest and release their energy more slowly. If you are going to engage in intense activity, you want to be consuming at least some proportion of food that’s easy to digest and quickly releases energy. In the context of intense activity, these are not “empty” calories, they are exactly what your body requires.
The pejorative connotation of “empty” is because most westerners get more calories than they should, although some still manage not to get all the vitamins and minerals, fiber, or other things they need from their diet. But it’s completely possible to get your daily recommended value of micronutrients without getting enough calories, especially if you’re exercising a lot. And in that case, foods that are dense in calories would be good, even if they offer nothing else.
It is true that “empty calories” does not have a specific technical meaning but is generally taken to mean a food that is essentially all sugar or starch with little to no protein or ‘good’ fat content. Sugary soda, for instance, is ‘empty calories; french fries and milkshakes are also often considered to be nutritional voids even though they do have fats (and for a milkshake some proteins) because the amount of sugar or starch is excessive and if eaten in more than a small proportion (i.e. the typical American super-sized quantities) represents a significant proportion of the recommended daily intake.
I do take a bit of issue with the common refrain that “calories are calories”; in fact, a dietary calorie is the measure of net energy extracted in a bomb calorimeter that does not reflect the energy extracted and converted by the digestive system. For instance, you can eat 10,000 ‘calories’ of lean protein a day and you will not become obese, largely because you will not be able to digest more than a small fraction of those calories (and it will likely make you sick if you try to do so for more than a few days). Alternatively, you can consume 10,000 calories of raw sugar and your endocrine system will go into overdrive trying to convert the excess to subcutaneous fats to store later because mammals are evolved to convert sugars into storable fats; you won’t actually ‘burn’ these calories unless you are doing some kind of endurance sport but it will certainly affect your metabolism and body composition.
In general, you want to avoid “empty calories” because filling up on them leads to nutritional imbalances, and it is very easy to overindulge in them because they provide little satiety (feeling of fullness) and in the case of sucrose and fructose may leave you feeling even more hungry. However, in the case that you need easy calories to recover from exertion or during illness that makes it difficult to accept or keep solid food down as illustrated by @puzzlegal, it does provide accessible sustenance over the short term for recovery or to prevent gross malnutrition.
I must quibble though–potatoes contain a decent amount of protein, about 4.5 gm per medium sized potato, and a serving of french fries is probably roughly equivalent to a medium potato so french fries are a source of fat, protein and carbs–maybe not the best choice but certainly better than drinking a liter of pop.
The problem with using simple sugars to increase calorie load is the insulin crash they tend to cause. Those spikes and crashes can be very uncomfortable if you’re doing a lot of physical work, better to onboard more complex carbs along with fats and proteins to give your body a better base to work from.
Another anecdote: a friend once lost a dangerous amount of weight due to undiagnosed allergies. He was able to get at least some energy from sugary foods, which kept him alive, even though you cannot eat nothing but sugar as a long-term solution.
Note that Ready-to-use theraputic foods are not pure sugar; on the contrary, 10 to 12% of the total energy is in the form of proteins and 45 to 60% in the form of lipids, so carbohydrates are not even the main source of calories for this purpose.
Potatoes do contain a reasonable amount of protein and are a particularly good source of lysine but they are not a complete protein in and of themselves (lacking adequate proportions of tryptophan, methionine, and histidine); they also have other nutrients such as vitamins C and B6, potassium, and some fiber. However, when double-deep fried as most french fries are they are generally considered a net negative (debates over the best type of oil continues but there is near universal agreement that the partially hydrogenated fats that most fast food and ‘junk’ food like potato chips are cooked in has substantial negative impacts). And of course, people frequently eat french fries with sugar-laden ketsup which just ads to sugar intake. In general, french fries—as delicious as they are—are generally classed in the “empty calories” bucket, and even sweet potato fries that contain more nutrients and vitamins (although actually less protein than white potatoes) are not much better. You are better off eating a baked potato or roasted spuds than fries for a number of reasons.
Just to expand on this, since it’s something I have extensive experience with from multi-day endurance events - consuming of the order or 7000 to 8000 calories a day.
Low-GI carbs (and proteins, fats) that release energy slowly do so precisely because they are difficult to digest. So for most people, it won’t work to consume more than very small quantities of these during high-output efforts. On the other hand, consuming a large quantity of high-GI carbs in one go will give you an instant energy burst, but can lead to the spike-and-crash pattern that you describe.
So large meals preceding the event should incorporate more low-GI carbs with some proteins and fats, all of which will give you a slow extended energy release; then during the event continuously consume small amounts of easy-to-digest high-GI carbs.
I agree in general with what you say but I don’t think it’s useful for the people who need the information, they just don’t read the fine print. But I suppose just saying ‘a calorie is a calorie’ isn’t helping either because they’re still not listening to why some calories are more nutritious than others. I think somehow there must be a positive message to make about nutrition that doesn’t in the end send people over to the frozen dessert aisle at the grocery store, but it’s been elusive.
AFAIK its more a marketing term rather than a scientific one.
There is no such thing as “empty” calories. You should have a balanced diet with lots of fruit and vegetables, and not too many calories. Its probably a bad idea (and will make it hard to not ingest too many calories) to get a large percentage of your calories from processed foods with lots of sugar, sodium, etc. But that doesn’t mean there is something magically bad about those calories from processed food.
You can overdo it on fruit too. They are healthier than soft drinks, but they still have lots of calories. And fruit juice is often no better than Coke.
“Eat fresh foods, a lot of fruits and vegetables, healty sources of complete proteins, ‘good’ oils and fats, some grains and other sources of low GI carbohydrates and insoluble fiber, minimize processed foods, sugary or alcoholic beverages, and confections.” If you are eating a healthy diet with foods that provide good satiety there is actually little need or benefit in counting calories unless you are actually trying to put on muscle mass or ensure that you have sufficient energy for endurance training. The calorie/point-counting “reducing diet” industry is deliberately or otherwise perpetuating the notion that “diet” means restricting your eating and going hungry instead of just eating good food.
Good message, not catchy though. Yeah, the diet industry has been scamming people, now they are working hand in hand with the food industry to keep people in an endless cycle of over-eating and starvation diets.