How Much Can You Trust Calorie Labels?

[KHashmi317]

How Much Can You Trust Calorie Labels?

Quote

How accurate are calorie labels and how much do they tell you about the energy your body gets from food? What’s this keto diet that everyone on YouTube is going on about. And what’s with the idea of measuring how much fat you burn by analysing your breath?

00:00 Intro
00:36 What's a Calorie?
02:19 How Does One Measure Calories?
04:36 Problems With Calorie Labels
11:36 What Are Food Labels Good For?
13:28 What Else Can You Do?
17:58 Build Good Habits With Fabulous

 

[Alex K Chen]

Almond bioavailability is lower, AS ARE calories in foods high in soluble/insoluble fibers like beans (eg do you really absorb all the calories in insoluble fibers that first go through gut bacteria?)

I want a calorie-ometer after I go on my next nut binge.

OMG snack foods WOW, this is another reason to NOT trust non-keto processed foods.. Also, 32% less calories in raw almonds?? YES almonds are healthier than other nuts

Also wtf, I eat raw eggplant all the time, it's not toxic

Edited December 27, 2022 by InquilineKea

[drewab]

The food label question is irrelevant for me, as it is for most people here, since virtually nothing I have consumed in the past 11+ years on a mildly CR'd diet has a food label. I literally can't think of a single item that does...

[pwonline]

20 hours ago, drewab said:

The food label question is irrelevant for me, as it is for most people here, since virtually nothing I have consumed in the past 11+ years on a mildly CR'd diet has a food label. I literally can't think of a single item that does...

Do you grow your own food?
unless you do it must have a label. To be honest I prefer food labels of even vegetables, they are a good approximation, you could look up on sites like cronometer but that in my opinion is a worse estimation than what you get from the merchants because cronometer is user inputted data.

Lastly food labels found on vegetables (for example), are they worked out as raw or cooked? cooking decreases micro nutrients and also effects nutrient absorption.

Another point is not many actually measure to the gram of their foods and can be off even a 100 calories easily. So many factors play a role.

[Saul]

I agree with you, pwonline.

But it is a problem -- it is hard to really know how many calories you are absorbing.  In fact, it's pretty clear that the number of calories actually absorbed by several different people eating the same diet is different.

One of the tricks that I find useful is:  Measure your morning weight immediately after doing your ablutions, prior to eating anything, every morning -- if you change one item in your diet, this measurement (taken the day before, and the day after you make the change), will give you a hint, how the two foods compare, in calories, for you.

[pwonline]

12 hours ago, Saul said:

I agree with you, pwonline.

But it is a problem -- it is hard to really know how many calories you are absorbing.  In fact, it's pretty clear that the number of calories actually absorbed by several different people eating the same diet is different.

One of the tricks that I find useful is:  Measure your morning weight immediately after doing your ablutions, prior to eating anything, every morning -- if you change one item in your diet, this measurement (taken the day before, and the day after you make the change), will give you a hint, how the two foods compare, in calories, for you.

good advice, change small part of your diet at a time.
as cr practitioners our calorie intake estimation is important. I find weight measuring a very good tool. At the end of the day we try to be stay consistent and manage best we can.

[Alex K Chen]

I ate two entire packs of keto bread believing that it was 0 net carbs (as advertised). It's Aldi's. It was supposedly 35 calories per 28g slice of "keto bread"

The result.. my BG exploded up to a level it has NEVER EVER seen before.

"modified wheat starch" can mean so many different things and is often a sketch ingredient

 

Edited January 1, 2023 by InquilineKea

[IgorF]

Hm,

I already wondered about so precise calories counting in the real life scenarios and finally I overcame my laziness and found this:

Intra- and interindividual variability of resting energy expenditure
in healthy male subjects – biological and methodological variability
of resting energy expenditure

DOI: 10.1079/BJN20051551

It is available via scihub.

Authors did some relatively good quality measurement of resting energy expenditure variability to confirm that for a person there could be several percent variability in a normal, stable lifestyle, w/o heavy excercising, diet changes, deseases, etc.

Also they referred to another study where intrapersonal variability is estimated as around 10%.

Given the BMR value of around 1500kcal for not much active person it seems narrowing to 50-150kcal/day estimates based on published values of different food types should be taken with a big grain of salt. The same 5-15% variability is perhaps a norm for any product in addition to metabolic variability, sugar-rich plant and so on.

My own observations are similar, sometimes I am pretty stable in weight with constant -100kkcal/day in cronometer, sometimes I am gaining weight slowly with zero balance, sometimes I don't with +100. I am learned how to distinguish oscillations caused by slight diet changes where glycogen stores are growing or depleting (and gut microflora is rearranging), so I am not taking into account such transitional changes.

Is so precise (e.g. ~100kcal/day) estimates with cronometer and food labels really working for somebody on a few weeks/months periods?

Br,

Igor

 

[Dean Pomerleau]

3 hours ago, IgorF said:

Is so precise (e.g. ~100kcal/day) estimates with cronometer and food labels really working for somebody on a few weeks/months periods?

Most CR veterans stop counting calories after a while, and either eat the same thing every day or go by body weight. 

--Dean

 

[pwonline]

I eat exact same meal everyday.

I eat ~480 grams of raw broccoli and roughly ~480 raw collard greens (spring greens)

Sometimes I go slightly over (500g raw collard greens) and those calories even though are minor still test my OCD.

so I adjust my EVOO consumption, it just fluctuates within a gram of EVOO lol.

but I still force myself to weigh everything, I'm relatively still starting out on CR (around a year so far) so maybe in time I'll relinquish this added responsibility but 

I like to remind my conscious and sub conscious that we must not break this routine no matter what. Like a daily affirmation to my will power and desire to see this experiment (CRON) through till I die LOL

[mccoy]

7 hours ago, pwonline said:

and those calories even though are minor still test my OCD.

It's good that you are realizing you are suffering some form of fixation,  may be a fully-fledged OCD.

If I can speak freely, none without a fixation would ever worry about 20 grams of collard greens or one gram of EVOO (which is also often within the error of measure of the system).

[Saul]

8 hours ago, Dean Pomerleau said:

Most CR veterans stop counting calories after a while, and either eat the same thing every day or go by body weight.

I agree.

  --  Saul

[pwonline]

10 hours ago, mccoy said:

It's good that you are realizing you are suffering some form of fixation,  may be a fully-fledged OCD.

If I can speak freely, none without a fixation would ever worry about 20 grams of collard greens or one gram of EVOO (which is also often within the error of measure of the system).

I agree but isn't it true all CRONNIEs suffer the same issue LOL. The things i've read about taking multiple supplements and long chemical names and constant blood tests. I literally eat whole foods, no supplements except potassium and sodium and spend 1.25 hours eating a day. but I love this community for sharing all the knowledge and experience 🙂

[Kate]

On 12/28/2022 at 2:00 PM, drewab said:

The food label question is irrelevant for me, as it is for most people here, since virtually nothing I have consumed in the past 11+ years on a mildly CR'd diet has a food label. I literally can't think of a single item that does...

Hi Drewab, I am interested in talking to you for a newspaper article about your CR journey, are you able to talk at all today. I am in London

[Kate]

On 1/14/2023 at 2:36 PM, Dean Pomerleau said:

Most CR veterans stop counting calories after a while, and either eat the same thing every day or go by body weight. 

--Dean, would you be prepared to talk to me for a story I am writing about the recent Columbia paper on DNA methylation and CR. I am on here all day cruising for willing case studies who are happy to talk to me about their CR journey. Many thanks, Kate Spicer

 

 

 

[Kate]

i think the point about labels is a valid one, I find them most important for looking at carb levels rather than calories coz if the carbs are super high I know CR will be made much harder

[Ron Put]

I enter my food  fairly religiously, not so much to count calories, but to track nutrients. I try to eat a fairly wide variety of foods, presumably my microbiome is happier because of it.I also travel (with a small rechargeable food scale) a fair bit to different parts of the world and food variety is often forced on me, not that I mind it.

One important caveat: since I try to consume mostly whole foods, I enter the NCCDB, USDA, ESHA and similar values rather than the label values, as rightly or wrongly, I place more trust in such agencies.

As a side note, perhaps the poll should be updated, as 8 years is a long time and technology and apps change...

[paula]

I eat on a rotation, with such nutrition items as beans, citrus peel, walnuts, cottage cheese, greens grown in the yard, eggs grown in the yard, and fruits and veg grown here or near always slotted in. No food after 12 hours except for a small dinner of a couple tablespoons cooked veg or handful of lettuce. The rest of the rotation includes one and a half days with meat and salad only, no carrot or tomato, Mega nutrition waffle (nettle lemon ginger, beans, spices and an egg) with neighborhood fruit puree and a dab of local yogurt on four of the other days, sweet potato or winter squash or pumpkin three or four days a week. The rest of my food consists of a sandwich on Friday, beans and rice the other days, and once in awhile ice cream or smoothie, a binge on bread, beef jerky or other dry meat. I don't eat oil anymore. Except for the paper towel I'm not phobic about oil. My best source of fat is meat. I love eating bones or fried whole fish, chicharrones etc.I don't weigh myself except once a month, too scary.  My weight stays the same. I try to do strength training at the gym a few hours a week. I walk a lot. I am 70. I have chronic untreatable stable anorexia. I originally joined this site trying to find out how to get my fingernails and toenails back after I retired. When I retired I took on anorexia and lost 30 pounds out of exhilaration of freedom to eat what and when I wanted. That caused severe malnutrition. Malnutrition is getting under control after a few years at this new set point. I heard from cronies that weight would stabilize on calorie restriction, so now I don't know if I'm still on calorie restriction but weight stabilized anyway. I end up with osteoporosis, sarcopenia, too low blood sodium, too  high blood potassium, etc, but I'm no longer depressed about it, I'm alive and very happy. Ive got it made, and I feel supported by this forum. I judge calories by how soon I get hungry after I eat it, and how big my belly still is after it digests. If its too good to be true it is.

Edited February 21, 2023 by paula
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