National Post (National Edition)
THE GREAT CALORIE CON
MAKING DIET A NUMBERS GAME HASN’T STOPPED OBESITY
We’ve been counting calories to keep ourselves inshapeforthebestpart of a century now — but it seems we still haven’t got the knack.
When American nutritionist Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters published her influential book, Diet and Health: With Key to the Calories, in 1918, she invited readers to think about what they ate not in terms of portion size, but numbers. Her guide would popularize the concept of counting calories as a method of weight control, and remained on bestseller lists for four years.
Fast-forward to modern life, and calorie counting is ubiquitous. The food in our shopping baskets carries information about its nutritional value, while recent labelling at fast-food outletsmeansthatwecandetermine the content of our takeaways and lunchtime sandwiches, from Pizza Hut to McDonald’s. SmartphoneappssuchasMyFitnessPal maketrackingcaloriesassimple asscanningabarcode.
And yet, we’re fatter than ever in the Western world. Childhood obesityisanationalcrisisinseveral different countries. Clearly, counting calories (a recommended intake of 2,500 calories per day for moderately active men, about 2,000 calories per day for moderately active women) isn’t helping.
So are we just bad at math? Or is the calorie count as a way of stayinginshapeagreatcon?The short answer is, it depends who you ask.
“Counting calories is an oldschool, outdated approach to nutrition,” says Joe Wicks, the bestselling body coach who refuses to include calorie counts in his recipes and meal plans.
“When I was a personal trainer, I used to train people who’d exercise for two hours a day and then obsess about their calories, sometimes eating fewer than 1,000 a day — not something I’d ever recommend.
“There is no magic daily calorie intake that works for everyone; when it comes to nutrition, we’re all unique. So diets that setcalorierulesforeveryoneare completely flawed, inaccurate and just lead to yo-yo dieting. Andmisery.”
While there’s nothing wrong with the math behind what nutritionists call the “calories in/ calories out” model, it puts the onus on the individual wanting to keep weight off to keep their calories balanced; to understand that if you eat 500 fewer calories than you burn every day, after a week you will have lost a pound of fat; and that a breakfast muffin packing more than 600 calories will require, on average, a full hour running on a treadmill to be burned off.
“If your goal is fat loss, you fundamentally can’t ignore calories, because they’re the maths behind achieving the body you aspire to,” says leading personal trainer Matt Roberts. “If you want to lose fat, that means convincing the body to burn its stores as fuel, which means consuming fewer calories than you use up every day. Understanding more or less where you are day-to-day is important.
“What we don’t want to happen, of course, is for people to be- sorb fewer calories from nuts and seeds than the Atwater system would suggest, for instance, but more from fibre-rich foods including kale, tomatoes and black beans. Cooking food also changestheamountofcaloriesyou’re likelytoabsorbfromit:raw,natural foods typically take more energy to digest, making them effectively less calorific than heavily processed ready meals that contain the same ingredients.
“Calories out” can be just as imprecise as a metric: genetics, hormones and your weight history can all affect how much you burn during activity, making the guesstimates of your effort given by most exercise equipment almost woefully imprecise.
And then there’s the different effect calories from different foods have on the body. Take a pair of breakfast toast toppings: strawberry jam and mashed avocado. “If you fuel your body with high-sugar foods such as jam, your body fires up insulin signalling,” says Roberts. “If that ain has ever seen, what are they doing wrong? It’s tough to say. Certainly, they’ve embraced meal-delivery services such as JustEat and UberEats, bring often-unhealthy restaurant eating home and make upsizing a constant temptation. But they’ve also taken up home cooking via meal-packaging services.
An increasingly sedentary lifestylemayalsobeafactor,witha United States study last year finding that half of millennials were as inactive as 60-year-olds, and everything from Netflix to online shopping leaching the activity out of everyday life.
But science and society also playarole:howevermanycalorie counts food manufacturers display,theyareinanarmsraceto produce evermore binge-worthy, “hyperpalatable” foodstuffs — the kind that triggers our hunger hormones without ever making us really full. In this sense, millennials are just victims of progress: however carefully you’re counting,it’stoughtoresistthe allure of chips custom-made to drive you crazy.
Which gets to the heart of the problem with calorie counting as a way to lose weight: what actually works in real life? And the answer, again, seems to be: it depends.
“Calorie counting has actually done quite well in trials, on average, but there’s a major caveat,” says Michael Hull, a researcher at science-based nutrition site Examine.com. “Those who do well with calorie counting often do really well. You’ll find people who have counted their calories for a decade or more, after using the strategy to reliably lose weight. The most important factor is adherence”
This, in the end, seems to be key. For all calorie counting’s inaccuracies, it works for people who stick to it: but if it seems like drudgery — and, for most people, itis—itwon’tbesustainable.
What we really need are simpler ways to eat better and, preferably, for food companies to stop making high-calorie, insulinspiking foods so available and so enticing.
Dr. Peters — who once wrote that she hoped “sometime it will be a misdemeanour, punishable by imprisonment, to display candy as shamelessly as it is done” — would probably approve.