Let’s take something simple, like a cup of coffee.
I know heating it adds “small calories”.
Does it add enough to even count as dietary calories?
Does it add as much as a spoonful of sugar?
It adds actual calories (i.e., calories, the unit of heat/energy); it doesn’t create calories that your body can turn into energy (or fat), AFAIK, aside from the warming of your gut from the hot food.
It does? Why?
The calorie is a unit of heat energy, so naturally heating food adds calories to it. On the other hand, a Calorie is a unit of heat energy which can be extracted from food by the body, and is also called a kilocalorie. Heating food does not add Calories to it. Confused yet?
Sounds to me like heating food adds calories but not kilocalories.
OK, then how many small-c calories does it take to boil a cup of coffee? And why aren’t those going to equal Big-c calories/1000?
Also, as I recall, the Big-c calories listed in the food label are determined by burning the food and finding out how much it raises the temperature of water.
Yes a food Calorie is 1000 calories. The difference is really one of semantics. Food Calories are used to indicate how much heat energy the body can extract from a food by oxidizing it, not simply how much heat energy is in the food.
That is, I think this part of your analysis is wrong: “a Calorie is a unit of heat energy which can be extracted from food by the body”
Quite the opposite, rather than being a subjective amount based on what your body may or may not digest, it is an objective amount determined in a lab by raising water temperature.
If your body is not able to dissolve entire bone bits in the hash they would still count toward the calories just as much as if they had been ground into bonemeal.
Seems to me that Calories, then, is a measurement of “nutrition” rather than heat. Then again, heat is created from the enzymatic processing of “nutrition” molecules. Confused yet?
A “calorie” (small “c”) is the amount of energy needed to raise 1 ml. (cc) of water 1 degree Centigrade. Since there are a thousand calories in one Calorie (or kilocalorie), you do the math to find out why heating something does not appreciably add to the caloric content.
My math is too rusty. How many cc’s are in a cup of coffee?
And let’s just say for conjecture that we are raising it an average of 100 degrees. Wouldn’t that equal a 1000 at some point?
The calories in food aren’t really a measure of how much energy the food contains, but how much energy your body can extract from it and put to use. Heat just doesn’t add anything to that.
1cup= 237 cc
Lets say the room is at 70ºF (21ºC) and the coffee goes to 185ºF (85ºC)
That’s 237x64 or 15,168 small-c calories.
Or, 14 Big-c Calories.
A teaspoon of sugar has 15 calories.
Therefore, if my math is correct (and someone will correct it soon, I’m sure, sigh… ) then a person adding a spoonful of sugar could compensate by drinking the coffee cold.
Well, yes, I’m aware of that. And I guess I can understand how someone would confuse kinetic energy on the molecular level (heat) with potential chemical energy.
If you eat your sugar cold, your body will still metabolize the same amount of energy from it as if you’d heated it to near-boiling and singed the soft tissues in your mouth and esophagus. Heat and Calorie content are orthogonal to each other: One does not affect the other.
How is that possible? Because Calorie content is chemical energy, not radiant energy. That means it is stored in chemical bonds and is a property of the chemical itself. As long as the chemical retains its existence, it will have the same amount of chemical energy. That is true no matter how the chemical energy is extracted, be it by cellular respiration or a bomb Calorimeter.
(It was a markedly bad idea to call chemical energy units Calories and radiant energy units calories. But one uses what one is stuck with.)
Ah, ok. You didn’t seem to know what he meant by a “small calorie”. He’s correct about that, at least.
Bottom line, I don’t believe the part that the calories on lables have NO relationship to heat.
When I went to school, the whole idea of food calories was that they were equal to heat.
The units (little- calories and Big-Calories(=1000 little- calories) may make them seem very unalike to all of you, but I don’t buy it.
“potential chemical energy”? “energy your body can extract”?
It’s all energy.
Write it as E=mc[sup]2[/sup] and it all comes out as energy.
By your reasoning you could survive just drinking very hot water all the time along with sufficient vitamin and mineral supplements. After all, you’re taking in calories. Why bother with carbs at all?
Let’s reverse the process and you’ll see better, I think.
Drop a person from 70ºF to 0ºF, say sleeping in the woods in winter, and he loses heat. His body makes up for that by burning his fat calories.
If he drinks a cup of coffee, his body will not have to make up for so much heat loss, for a net gain.
How much less? The same as a teaspoon of sugar (and please don’t burn it- no need for dramatics)
So? All you’ve shown is that chemical energy can be converted to radiant energy. You haven’t shown that the human body can reverse that process, and with good reason–it can’t.
Q.E.D. Drink only water? That’s one of them ad absurdum fallacies, isn’t it? How would that be different that complaining I can’t live on the teaspoons of sugar alone?
Nobody is talking about living on it, just getting 15 calories from it.
If I got 15 calories from a protein pill I also would be doing without carbs. But it’s irrelevant whether I could live on protein pills.