One of the biggest structural flaws in nutritional science is calories.

Calories is a stupid measurement for humans to measure for what they eat.
It literally is, how much heat you can get out of a sample.

Wood has a lot of calories. As anyone sitting in front of a fireplace can tell.
However, wood has almost no nutritional benefit for a human.
Thus a calorie, at best, is a poor measurement of food a body needs.

In the current paradigm of nutrition, a calorie is a calorie.
This is the biggest lie. It is the lie that BigFood hides behind when selling poison, packaged as food in grocery stores.

This lie needs to stop.
It is actually killing people.

Calories are Calories

When we reduce the nutritional value of something to a single number, it is convenient, but it also become unuseful.

We can compare a stick of wood to a stick of celery. The wood has lots of calories. The celery has almost no calories. But which one is more nutritious?

A hamburger patty, one made from from fresh hamburger in your kitchen, or one from McDs which was pressed, cooked, frozen, thawed, fried on each side and then nuked until it has no life left in it, which one is more nutritious? They both have the same calories.

A steak will fill you up and give you a lot of energy through the day. The same amount of calories of chocolate bar will probably make you sick, and a sugar high, followed by a sugar crash.

However, most of the diets and nutrition guides talk about eating a certain amount of calories.
There is no distinguishing between calories. A calorie is a calorie.
It is all about calories in and calories out.

And this is the lie.

BigFood is poisoning you

Our obesity epidemic is not really from eating too many calories and too little exercise.

It is from eating "food" that is not food.
The McDs burger may have calories, but it doesn't have much nutrition.
Worse, it has a lot of addictive things in it. Sugar, gluten and chemical tastes.

So, your body is starving. You stomach says it is full. The addictions says you want more.

Worse, these "foods" gum up your digestive system. A double whammy.

Your body goes into emergency mode. Saving every bit of energy into fat cells. Slows down the metabolism.
Plus, it puts all the bad things that the body cannot use into fat cells, plumping them up. Taking up room that could have been used for some kind of energy, but instead, it is something that will have to be cleaned out later. Difficult to clean out, and it will probably make you sick when all the toxins are released at once.

The calorie, the unit of measure of nutrition by the FDA, is at the heart of all these problems.

If we didn't have this misleading guideline, we would be much better able to tell what is good for us to eat. Or if it was completely missing, then we would know to look for information elsewhere.

The calorie lie also hides how little we actually know about nutrition.

We used to believe that food was medicine.
Now we believe pills are medicine.
There is nothing that affects the body that is not already found in foods.
As in, our body has receptors and processes that deal with these items.

It is about time we get rid of the word "calorie" when talking about nutrition, and send it back to science where it is simply a measure of heat.

This lie is needs to stop. It is really killing people.

All images in this post are my own original creations.