Calories counter to lose weight
"The sugar lobby out-witted, out-lobbied and out-paid the fat lobby, and managed to get the finger of blame pointed at fat for causing obesity, diabetes and rising incidence of heart attacks," he says.
In an attempt to slim down the population, the concept of the calorie became popular. "It was something people thought they could control", says London-based freelance journalist Peter Wilson, who wrote Death of the Calorie in The Economist's 1843 magazine.įat became the focus of government policy because a gram of fat contained more calories than a gram of carbohydrates or protein, he says. In the years after World War II, US public health authorities became increasingly concerned by the rising rate of heart disease, which was associated with weight gain. "She was the mother of calorie counting and calories in weight loss." The halo effect "She began trying to cut her calories to lose weight and it succeeded," Dr Yeo says.ĭr Yeo says Peters' book "weaponised" the calorie. She calculated the calorie content of various foods in her diet and counted how many calories she was consuming. The book was based on her syndicated newspaper column in which she documented her process for losing weight. In 1918, Dr Lulu Hunt Peters published her best-selling diet book Diet and Health: With Key to the Calories. Lulu Hunt Peters popularised calorie counting in the US. Obesity was not a pressing public health issue in the 19th century, with experts more interested in combating malnutrition.īut in the 20th century, weight loss became a priority – especially for women chasing the "ideal" body shapes presented in magazines and on the silver screen. "These numbers, these Atwater factors as they're still called, are the basis of all the calorie counts we see on every single food packet across the world today," Dr Yeo says. He used these calculations to come up with a system for determining the calorie content of foods, for example nine calories per gram of fat and four calories for every gram of carbohydrates or protein. He subtracted the calories in the poo from the calories in the food in order to come up with a total number of calories absorbed. So Atwater measured the calories of many different foods. Then he fed those foods to human subjects, waited for them to digest the food and measured their excrement "You eat corn on a cob, and then the next day you look in the loo, and you clearly haven't absorbed all the sweet corn," Dr Yeo says.
He understood what University of Cambridge obesity researcher Giles Yeo calls the "sweetcorn scenario". He set about measuring the potential energy of different types of food.īut, unlike some previous efforts to do this, he didn't just measure the food once.Ītwater considered how much of the food we eat is actually absorbed into the body. "He was really interested in how the body was processing energy," Dr Marsh says.
Rather than trying to measure the energy of steam engine fuel, Atwater was attempting to measure the human body's metabolic rate.
#Calories counter to lose weight series#
Wilbur Atwater ran a series of experiments to determine how the body absorbed calories from food. Part of the reason for the calorie's continued use, especially in the USA, was thanks to a 1887 article by chemist Wilbur Atwater, entitled The Potential Energy of Food, published in the popular monthly Century magazine. "Of course," Marsh says, "this leads to a tremendous amount of confusion."Īdding to this confusion, the calorie isn't the standard unit energy in the International System of Units - that's the joule (a kilojoule is 1,000 joules). In 1879, French chemist and politician Marcellin Berthelot distinguished the two units by designating the smaller one as a calorie, with a lower-case c, and the larger as a capitalised Calorie. This was not the only definition, however, with others defining a calorie as the heat needed to warm a single gram of water by one degree Celsius -a unit 1,000th of the size of Clément's. He defined the calorie as the heat needed to raise the temperature of a kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. The calorie began its life as a unit of stored heat.įrench physicist Nicolas Clément used the term in the 1820s while giving lectures on the efficiency of steam engines.