Counting calories is not a science

[kestrell]

Thinking about all the women who have been pressured into counting calories for their entire lives, the entire diet industry seems obscene.

https://www.1843magazine.com/features/death-of-the-calorie

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

WHAT A GREAT ARTICLE THAT WAS!

I learned much, and I want to read his book (and shove it down the throats of a few million health professinoals).

My favorite bit was :

The difficulty in counting accurately doesn’t stop there. The calorie load of carbohydrate-heavy items such as rice, pasta, bread and potatoes can be slashed simply by cooking, chilling and reheating them. As starch molecules cool they form new structures that are harder to digest. You absorb fewer calories eating toast that has been left to go cold, or leftover spaghetti, than if they were freshly made. Scientists in Sri Lanka discovered in 2015 that they could more than halve the calories potentially absorbed from rice by adding coconut oil during cooking and then cooling the rice. This made the starch less digestible so the body may take on fewer calories (they have yet to test on human beings the precise effects of rice cooked in this way). That’s a bad thing if you’re malnourished, but a boon if you’re trying to lose weight.