Are Food Labels Accurate as Regards Calories

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 10:07 am and is filed under Healthy Eating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

You could be anywhere whether it be, a take-away food store or a supermarket and looking at a particular item, just to see how many calories it contains. When we are trying to lose weight this becomes quite an important decision.

As to what we put in our shopping baskets for our weekly shop. So we always tend to take in good faith what is written on the particular label of said food product and probably don’t think any more about it.

But exactly how accurate are they, we know that in order to keep our weight under control that women need to consume 2000 calories per day and men 2500 calories per day.

But how do we know exactly how accurate the labels that we read every day whilst food shopping. Can we eat what we want ? and know without doubt we are eating the right amount of calories per day.

Surely maintaining your weight is merely a case of calories in calories out, so if you have a deficit of 3500 calories per week which works out at about 500 calories, per day times by seven, then you will lose the one pound of fat per week. In order to maintain a healthy weight loss.

So can we rely upon what we are reading on the labels, well according to a band of researchers apparently not, they are not as accurate as once thought.

What they say is the method of counting calories is very old and antiquated these days so it can’t be relied upon. They argue that the amount of energy that you will actually get from the food won’t be what it says it is. Some food labels will overestimate by 25 percent and underestimate by the same figure, which is quite a big fluctuation as far as accuracy is concerned.

And the world over people’s abdomens are increasing in size and not decreasing. The researchers say, it’s time to set the record straight and let people know what is really going on as far as counting calories is concerned on food packaging.

Just so you can get an idea of how old the system of counting calories is it dates back to the 19th century and was invented by a chemist known as Wilbur Olin Atwater who came from the USA .

He heated up portions of food in controlled conditions and measured how much heat energy they gave off which was how calories were measured all those years ago.

By using his particular methods he came up with the conventional figures of fat having nine calories per gram, and carbohydrate and protein added up to four calories per gram which are the figures we still use today.

These particular figures are approximate measures of calories and not really set in stone.

When we eat food we slowly digest it is not a combustible process like some of us tend to think, a nutritionist based in Norfolk by the name of Geoffrey Livesey, says that when the food is traveling through your body and being broken down the amount of energy to do so can vary greatly anywhere between five to 25 percent, so this can vary the amount of calories that your body takes from the food overall.

He calculated that dietary fibre is now measured at 1.5 calories instead of two per gram, and protein is down from four calories group per gram to 3.2 calories per gram

Now if we add these facts into real life we could be looking at a error of nearly 20 calories per day if we compare two items side-by-side let’s say two energy bars for instance.

If you work this out over a year this could at add up to one kilogram of fat in a year which is quite a lot.

Also texture can come into this strangely enough if you have one energy bar that has a softer texture and one that has a harder texture. Then which do you think will tend to make you fatter?

in Japan they decided to find out they did a study on some rats and here is how it turned out.

The food pellets that they were given had only one difference the texture, they both tasted the same and had the same amount of calories but one of them was softer, this was the only notable difference.

Because the softer pellet was easy to chew the rats eating were the ones that gained more abdominal fat.

A similar study in Japan which revolved around young females and what they ate, found that the ones that ate harder foods weighed less than the ones that ate softer foods weighed more.

So things to bear in mind from this are the texture of food and not to get too worried about the amount of calories that are actually suggested on the box. It would seem that is a guide to how many calories there are within the item and not how your body processes it.

Going back to the actual texture of food this might be one of the reasons why we like eating things like cake etc because of the texture of it it’s a very soft food as well as the taste of it.

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