Calories? You’re Kidding!

A couple of hundred calories (200 to 300) at best, I remembered having read.  I changed the subject, even though everyone knows psychiatrists are supposed to love to talk about sex. If someone is seeking sex to burn calories, it doesn’t sound as if they are having enough fun.  I mean, was she even doing it “right?”

Apparently, other women are thinking the same way.  I can imagine some yelling “give me an orgasm so I use more calories,” for that is the assertion in a periodical I don’t usually consult, Woman’s Day. Let’s put the calories-in-calories-out bit to sleep, for once and for all.  This is an idea that has turned into an obsession that has no real or healthy relevance to the human condition. Honest. A calorie is simply a unit of — would you believe — heat energy.  And heat is a waste product of combustion, of light, of friction.  Can you imagine judging the speed of a car by the breeze it makes in passing? Or the weight of a cow by how much it poops? it’s defined in all dictionaries initially as that unit of heat — often defined as “large,” to raise one kilogram of water 1 degree centrigrade —  or “small,” to raise a gram of water 1 degree centigrade. The problem comes with the second part of the definition, when “calories” are the heat energy when food gets “oxidized” or somehow turned into energy in the body. Food in the body goes through LOTS of chemical changes, summarized by dictionaries as “oxidation.” Oxidation, in the practical world of physics means — burning. There is actually (or at least was, in prehistoric times when I went to medical school) an apparatus called a “calorimeter.”  Using one of these, the calorimeter measures how much energy you get when you burn a food. Yes, burn.  This instrument was invented by Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier in 1780.(Vive la France, country of my medical education) The “father of chemistry” brought quantitative measurement into chemistry.  I have seen instruments of the era in French museums.  I mean, there are adorable stories about how he measured heat production with a “guinea pig” by much snow could be melted by its heavy breathing. He likened the phenomenon he was studying to the burning of a candle. Anyone who cannot see that burning a candle and putting food into a living body are really different processes probably should not be allowed to live among human beings, whose biochemical processes have been subject to an infinite amount of serious intellectual inquiry. When I was a child, I loved Michael Faraday’s “Chemical History of a Candle.”  The edition I loved.from the Harvard Classics Science Papers, is actually online. Or, a nice Scientific American review, if preferred. Nice to know about candle wax and where it is from and all. Nice to some, I suppose, to know that burning a gram of fat gives you 9 calories of heat energy, while a gram of protein or carbohydrate only gives your 4 calories of heat energy.But you may wonder what this really means. It means that fat in its chemical structure has more “high energy bonds.” More of those double dashes between the carbon atoms in those lovely but insufficient as limited to two dimensions representations of mostly carbon and hydrogen but other delightful atoms, that make up molecules that constitute our miraculous bodies. Fat burns and gives you more energy than other stuff.  A wonderful reason to eat some.  Mine is doing that as I pound my computer keyboard,

To develop properly, and conduct nervous impulses, your brain cells need a lovely covering of fat. And yet the general wisdom in America for over 40 years has been to eat a low-fat diet, avoid red meat, butter and whole milk.  In other words to pay attention to calories. So what has this gotten us?  Fatter and Fatter until we have obesity epidemics and high heart-attack and stroke rates. And here, I am the woman who always thought that calling someone a “fathead” was a compliment!