We can’t even measure calories accurately, never mind predicting how much your specific body will actually absorb. Maybe we could be more accurate with vitamins and stuff, but I dunno.
The only way to get an accurate reading on calorie count is to burn it. 1 kilocalorie (nutritional calorie) can increase the temperature of 1kg of water by 1 C°
But burning isn’t how your body utilizes the calories. Some things burn just fine yet are entirely useless as a (human) food source, like wood. This complicates things.
For instance, we still don’t know if our bodies can actually use ethanol (drinking alcohol) as a fuel source. Is that vodka shot adding to your daily calorie intake?
But for relatively unprocessed foods, seems completely reasonable to me at first glance. The relative sugar content of, say, an apple, is dependent on all sorts of parameters (sun, water, soil…). The gluten content of wheat, iron content of vegetables, all of these things are variable. The more “natural” a food is, the higher the variability (as opposed to, say, artificial candy — that should be pretty uniform).
TIL that there’s an allowed 20% margin of error in accuracy per the FDA.
That seems way bigger than it needs to be …
We can’t even measure calories accurately, never mind predicting how much your specific body will actually absorb. Maybe we could be more accurate with vitamins and stuff, but I dunno.
The only way to get an accurate reading on calorie count is to burn it. 1 kilocalorie (nutritional calorie) can increase the temperature of 1kg of water by 1 C°
But burning isn’t how your body utilizes the calories. Some things burn just fine yet are entirely useless as a (human) food source, like wood. This complicates things.
For instance, we still don’t know if our bodies can actually use ethanol (drinking alcohol) as a fuel source. Is that vodka shot adding to your daily calorie intake?
Vodka’s back on the menu, boys!
It was off the menu?
For highly processed foods, I agree.
But for relatively unprocessed foods, seems completely reasonable to me at first glance. The relative sugar content of, say, an apple, is dependent on all sorts of parameters (sun, water, soil…). The gluten content of wheat, iron content of vegetables, all of these things are variable. The more “natural” a food is, the higher the variability (as opposed to, say, artificial candy — that should be pretty uniform).