![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 |
This: "one Calorie equals 1000 15 °C calories" means what? Isn't is supposed to be one Calorie equals 1000 calories? Qaz I get it now on second reading of the table... answered my own question. Qaz
I would like to see a discussion of how calories are measured in food. Specifically what kind of lab equipment is used and how it works. Does something like this have a place in wikipedia?
I'm not quite sure whether this is accurate:
Firstly, I see from the entry for TNT that it this should be thermochemical calories. Secondly, does that mean that the definition of thermochemical calories is related to the energy released by TNT, or is TNT somehow defined by the energy that is released? If the former, this should be mentioned above where thermochemical calories are first mentioned. If the latter, I fail to understand how this works. I also think we should use a different mass of TNT to avoid the use of billion, which is an ambiguous value (in UK English it traditionally means 10^12, not 10^9 as it is being used here).
I will fix the first and third of these, although feel free to revert me if you disagree. Somebody else really needs to clarify the second.
Instead, what we have is two parallel definitions in the development of these units, with a variation in the quantity of water involved. The pound was used in developing the Btu, but for he metric calories, two different choices were made: a gram of water, or a kilogram of water.
This is somewhat similar to the evolution of moles from "gram molecular weight" or "kilogram molecular weight" or "pound molecular weight" to "gram mole" and "kilogram mole" and "pound mole", with the "gram mole" chosen to be the mole of SI.
The two different classes of calorie have been distinguished by calling them the "large calorie" and the "small calorie", or the "kilogram calorie" and the "gram calorie", and because of the way the use of these units evolved, by calling the large calorie a "foot calorie" or "nutrition calorie".
There is no laziness or word-shortening involved here, with people really meaning to say "kilocalorie" but dropping the "kilo".
Nutritionists don't use prefixes with food calories. So as a result, we end up with prefixes onl used with small calories. As a result, we often end up with the confusing, incongruous clashing of the word "calorie" used with the "kcal" abbreviation. Gene Nygaard 14:12, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
The text still does not accurately reflect that in Europe, there is only one single calorie, and food products are consistently (as required by law) labelled in kcal. The "large calorie" that the article describes as being universally used by nutritionist is very much a U.S. specific measurement. The article has at present a strong U.S.-speciftic point of view with regard to the distinction between a "small" and "large" calorie. I propose to restrict the description about nutritionists using a larger kg-based calorie as a practice limited to some countries, most notably the United States. Markus Kuhn 09:40, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
May I add to this discussion another authoritative reference to counter Gene's peculiar view of the world: NIST Special Publication 811, Appendix B.8: calorie, which says in footnote 12:
So U.S. food calories are "shortened" from kilocalories. The U.S. government at least says so. I rest my case. Markus Kuhn 11:49, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
Contrary to what Markus Kuhn writes now, and various statements made by other editors in the past, there is not a general convention in the United States (nor anywhere else) to write the large calorie as "Calorie" and to use the symbol "Cal" for it.
This is mostly the figment of the imagination of a few chemistry textbook writers, and something not even seen there much any more since most chemistry textbooks have stopped using the small calorie in chemistry. It is not and never was a generally accepted rule. Some chemistry professors still try to teach this in their classes, with little effect. You can throw in an occasional physics professor or textbook author as well, but mostly chemistry.
But chemists don't use large calories, and haven't done so for over half a century at least (and they don't use small calories much any more, either). They forgot to get the people who actually do use the large calorie to play along with their silly game, their attempt to impose a silly rule on the other guy.
Just do an internet search for the use of calorie in the United States, or look at diet books an the like. The word "calorie" is rarely capitalized, unless it starts a sentence or the like. Sure, you will find a small minority of books or internet pages or whatever which do so, but it certainly is not a convention in widespread use.
Of course, the biggest problem is that it is a silly rule in the first place. You cannot tell whether or not the rule is being followed, when the word would be capitalized for other reasons anyway.
I suppose Markus and others are somewhat legitimately confused by United States nutrition labels, where the word calorie is often used not just as a unit of measure, but rather as a synonym for the quantity being measured: food energy. With that substitution, there are generally no unit symbols after the numbers. Especially since the FDA does not encourage the use of joules, and does not even mention them in their labeling regulations, the numbers are usually presented as simply "Calories 130"; there is generally no use of "cal" or Cal" or "kcal" or any other unit symbol on these nutrition labels. It is not generally written in the other order, either. It isn't "130 Calories"; the word "Calorie" starts the line.
Of course, that unit qua quantity is indeed capitalized in that listing of the food energy per serving on most U.S. nutrition labels. But so what? The words "Protein" and "Sodium" and "Sugars" and the like are also capitalized. They are capitalized as the first word of a line in a table. That doesn't tell us anything about whether or not the large calorie is generally capitalized in the United States.
Markus, I imagine you probably have seen that chemistry-textbook rule states somewhere, and imagined it to be confirmed by the capitalization of the listing at the top of a U.S. nutrition label. But it just isn't so.
Just in case you don't have one of those labels handy, and for the benefit of others reading this, an example of these labels can be seen in the Food and Drug Administration web page "How to Understand and Use the Nutrition Facts Label".
Here's the clincher. Guess what else I see on all of those food labels, here in the United States? Look down towards the bottom of the one of these labels. Or look at the examples given for various foods in the bottom half of the FDA page linked to above. Do you see this footnote, which appears with only minor variations on all U.S. nutrition labels?
See? The word "calorie" is not capitalized in this sentence on any of the several labels listed on the FDA web page. I have noticed it capitalized on any label, though I wouldn't be greatly surprised if there are a few, somewhere, which do so.
This article needs to be rewritten, taking into consideration the two misconceptions I have set forth here, and any additional comments anyone else wishes to add here. Gene Nygaard 14:12, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
The use of "calorie" for kilogram calories when discussing food energy is not peculiar to either the United States or to North America. Gene Nygaard 05:55, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
Note that the image on the article page is not a U.S. label, nor a Canadian label. It is a bag of rice from the UK, in Europe. It says
Energy value | 1480 kJ |
(Calories | 350 kcal) |
In the U.S., as in the UK, "calories" and "kcal" are the very same thing when it comes to food. (In the U.S., manufacturers also have many of the same difficulties in getting the proper symbols for the untis of measure, though few if any use kJ so we don't see that specific problem.) Gene Nygaard 06:11, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
More searches
hits | |
---|---|
calories | |
"nine calories per gram" | 920 |
"9 calories per gram" site:.uk | 845 |
"9 cal per gram" | 1,380 |
"9 cals per gram" | 14,600 |
"9 cal/g" | 179 |
"9 cal/gm" | 224 |
"9 cals/g" | 107 (showing 40) |
"9 calories (38 kJ) per gram" | won't do exact search |
"9 calories/gram" | 265 |
"9 cal/gram" | 950 |
kcal | |
"9 kilocalories per gram | 353 |
"9 kilocalories per gram" site:.uk | 4 (showing 3) |
"9 kcal/g" site:.uk | 74 (showing 46) |
"nine kilocalories per gram" | 28 (showing 19) |
"9 kcal per gram | 195 |
"nine kcal per gram" | 25 (showing 5) |
"9 kcal/g" | 13,200 |
"9 kcal/gm" | 589 |
"9 kcal/gram" | 119 |
Using http://www.google.co.uk/ also gives 845 hits for "9 calories per gram" site:.uk Gene Nygaard 14:08, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
Peter Roget, Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, 1911? or later Project Gutenberg
382. Heat -- ...
[thermal units] calorie, gram-calorie, small calorie; kilocalorie,
kilogram calorie, large calorie; British Thermal Unit, B.T.U.; therm,
quad.
Gene Nygaard
15:04, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
Marcus, even a British transplant like you should be more aware of the world around him. I'd like to hear from any native English-speaker from the UK who is willing to stick his or her neck out and claim that it is not common in the UK to use "calories" to mean the large calories when discussing nutrition and diets. Any takers willing to claim that they never or rarely run into this usage? Gene Nygaard 15:30, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
I'm not quite sure whether this is accurate:
Firstly, I see from the entry for TNT that it this should be thermochemical calories. Secondly, does that mean that the definition of thermochemical calories is related to the energy released by TNT, or is TNT somehow defined by the energy that is released? If the former, this should be mentioned above where thermochemical calories are first mentioned. If the latter, I fail to understand how this works. I also think we should use a different mass of TNT to avoid the use of billion, which is an ambiguous value (in UK English it traditionally means 10^12, not 10^9 as it is being used here).
I will fix the first and third of these, although feel free to revert me if you disagree. Somebody else really needs to clarify the second.
It would be nice if the article said where the word "calorie" comes from. EdDavies 19:30, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
anybody knows?
unsigned comment by 209.30.240.182 (25 March 2006)
Please keep the calorie article focused on the unit of measurement for energy of that name, with a few notes on its particular use in food-labeling regulations. More detailed discussions of all other issues related to human nutrition, diet, weight control, etc. really belong into articles of their own. In particular, please do not spam the article with countless URLs to the many advertisement-financed web food/exercise-calories tables out there. Markus Kuhn 17:15, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
Agree with Markus that this category should not be spammed with food calorie table URLs. But to the extent that they are here, marketing claims relating to the numbers of foods should be required to be more detailed and accurate. Most data falls into the following categories:
Specifying separate figures for each category makes it easier to evaluate the quality of each web site's data. for TheDailyPlate, in particular, is really suspect and amounts to a marketing claim by the proprietors of the site. It seems to mostly be data of type #4, mostly from RecipeZaar, which is of dubious use to most people. It also tends to be inaccurate, since RecipeZaar automatically computes calorie counts from ingredients using USDA-derived data, and simply omits ingredients that it cannot match. As a minor side feature of a recipe site, the calorie counts have not been given much attention or priority by RecipeZaar.
Perhaps a format like this would be good:
so how do they calculate "calories burned" when exercising? Seems like there was some equation linking energy with "work" but I don't recall... Anyone know?
I am trying to understand what a calorie is but this contradiction makes definition unclear. Can someone who knows please fix this!? First: A calorie is a unit of measurement for energy. Then: The word "Calorie" is often mis-used to mean "energy" Thanks! user:rusl
I struck the last sentence of the first paragraph, as it was beyond confusing. I think it would be a good idea to spread this understanding of units versus what the units measure, and "Calorie" is a good example of that, but not in the introduction to this specific unit. This confusion only seems to happen with the word "high-calorie", not the word "calorie". One would never say something is tall by saying it's "high-feet", so I think this should be part of the "Calorie" page, but definitely not in the intro.
76.167.124.179
21:56, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
Elevation:
At what elevation does this definition of a calorie apply? We know that the energy required to heat water is greater at higher elevations, but I don't see/know anything about if there is a standard in this definition. If there is not, it seems like the definition in fact defines very poorly. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
TooManyTooMuch (
talk •
contribs)
21:39, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
so how do they calculate "calories burned" when exercising? Seems like there was some equation linking energy with "work" but I don't recall... Anyone know?
ilable, you divide the answer by the unit you want it in (4.2ish J for the short calorie, 4200ish J for the long Calorie used in food labelling).
Why is the fat measured by the weight of animal that consumes, as opposed to the SI unit for water which is volume??
The calorie is measured by the mass of the water it heats because water's density depends on its temperature. If you were defining the calorie by the volume of the water, you would have to choose whether to use the starting volume of the water or the end volume (after it's been heated by 1 °C).
How is it that a kcal is equivalent to 1 cal when it is also listed as 1000 cal.
I think there is a mistake in citing the number of calories in a pound of body fat. It should be 3500 kcal and 3500 calories.
This helped me! It comes from Spanish Wiki...
1 kcal = 1 Cal = 1000 cal = 4,184 kJ = 4.184 J-- Arcillaroja ( talk) 17:12, 2 November 2008 (UTC)
I've restored the units to the definition of a calorie (little c), because (a) that's what the international definition is, and (b) 1 mL of water is 1 g only at specific temperatures (technically only one temperature value). -- MarcoTolo 20:47, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
I believe this article has reached a high level of maturity and there is little further to improve. The vast majority of edits that we see make it worse and seem to be done by people who do not even bother to read the full article, the references or the talks page. In fact, I now find it regularly necessary to undo about month worth of edits just to keep it in good shape. I think it would be a good idea to give the article some more protected status at this point. Markus Kuhn 10:32, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
The introductory paragraph of this article contained a comment to the effect that a given number of calories could be expected to produce a certain weight gain in the average person. Given that this makes no reference to exercise, or to the food type whereby that energy is consumed (fat is more likely to be stored and result in weight gain than is carbohydrate, in moderate quantities), and given that the comment was dramatically out of keeping with the subject matter of the rest of the paragraph (discussed energy, units, the use as a measure of food energy, and then suddenly a comment on weight gain), I decided that the comment was both spurious and stylistically incongruous, and deleted it. I really don't think it belongs there. cmsg —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 86.31.109.93 ( talk) 01:22, 23 April 2007 (UTC).
I also agree with the statement that there's no cause to highlight in the first paragraph the distinction between a quantity, and a unit thereof.
BUT isn't there recent research calling into question this traditional conclusion that fat is more likely to be stored than carbs? Isn't there research calling into question the correctness of traditional calorie counts of food, because the original research methodology for measuring these calories is not equivalent to the biological processes within the human body? Shouldn't there be reference to these controversies in the article?
1 calINT = 4.1868 J (1 J = 0.23885 calIT) 1 calth = 4.184 J (1 J = 0.23901 calth) 1 cal15 = 4.18580 J (1 J = 0.23890 cal15)
Can someone explain what the subscripts mean?
1 pound is equivalent to approximately .45 kgs, so the weekly kcal deficit or surplus to lose/gain one kg should be less than that required to lose one pound.
According to the paged sourced, http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001940.htm , the weekly deficit/surplus required to lose/gain one kg/week is around 1600 kcal. (0.45359237 x 3500 kcal). That translates to a reduction of 500 kcal/day to lose one pound a week, and approximately 230 kcal/day to lose one kg.
A reduction in calorie intake by 7800 kcal/week, a reduction of more than 1000 kcal/day, is potentially dangerous. Maybe it should also be specified that the numbers stated are per week and not day, since they could get mixed up. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.113.219.51 ( talk) 21:37, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Are these all kcal or cal? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.167.218.224 ( talk) 12:00, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
Counter comment on discussion above I think this comment is total hooey. If you reduce your calorie intake by 500 calories below a maintenance level, you turn off your metabolism, which makes weight loss more difficult. Moreover calories, i.e. the amount of heat produced when foods are tested in oxidation reactions in a laboratory, have little or nothing to do with how food is metabolized in the body.
According to this article there are many kinds. But, which ones are used to measure food energy(at least for U.S. food companies). 207.177.111.36 ( talk) 15:01, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
I looked all over the internets and couldn't find clear sources for kcal/grams of fat, protein or carbohydrates. Some books that I've read say that carbohydrates are actually 3.75kcal/g. Needs clarification and citation. Thanks-- 70.74.82.114 ( talk) 22:58, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
Most people coming to this article will be looking for the definition of Calorie (that's large Calorie, the one used to measure food energy content), which is a kilocalorie. This article does not make the distinction very clear. That's because it's a mish-mash of rubbish written by obsessive nerds with no mind for the target audience of, or proper scope for an encyclopaedic article. Ah well, I suppose that this is Wikipedia.
Wikipedia (n): A mish-mash of rubbish written by obsessive nerds with no mind for the target audience of, or proper scope for an encyclopaedic article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.45.143.14 ( talk) 11:31, 16 March 2008 (UTC)
So in case a peanut butter producer adds the funny unit again into this article I post my modification here so that people can re-correct it if they like... let's hope that we consumers win this battle and not the PR departments of high energy yummy foods :) - alternatively we could - just for fun - start introduce "large" meters or grams on the other unit definition pages - this would be fun or at least a great joke and some industries will love it!
So here is my suggested and saved version for those interested in providing serious information:
One calorie (symbol: cal) is the amount of heat (energy) needed to increase the temperature of one gram of water by 1 °C. 1 cal is about 4184 J. "J" is the symbol for the official unit for energy, the "Joule". 1 kcal = 1000cal hence 1kcal is 4184 kJ. "k" is the official pre fix for units meaning "kilo" or a 1000 units of something e.g. 1kg = 1000g.
[Note, in recent decades the unit "calorie" has been "modified" (presumably for marketing purposes in the food industry) to conceal high energy content in food and confuse customers - especially in developed countries with high numbers of overweight people.]
Sometimes, on food labels, you may find "calorie" spelled with a large "C" e.g. "Calorie" or "Cal" to hide the fact that it contains actually 1000 calories - not just "one" calorie. The "inventors" of this unit gave it the name "large calorie" sometimes also referred to as "kilogram calorie". As this "unit" only works in writing - and is completely unnecessary - it makes no sense to use it other than confuse consumers.
The "calorie" - as opposed to the official energy unit "Joule" - is commonly used to express food energy, e.g. when discussing dieting or nutrition plans or simply reading the energy content on food labels. This is probably because 2500 kcal is smaller than 10000 kJ, the recommended energy intake for an adult person per day. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.245.124.221 ( talk) 17:58, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
Revision as of 21:51, 27 February 2008 by User:Unfree was anything but "Minor rewording". Amongst other things,
A calorie is a unit of measurement for energy.
was changed to
This is a major change. The unit now only applies to energy in the form of heat. Has the unit been dropped from nutritional labels recently? Food energy is certainly not a form of heat. I'll be reverting this substantial change. J ɪ m p 07:36, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
Both current use and historical use should be thoroughly covered. The current version of the article doesn't do this. The first sentence, "The calorie is a pre-SI unit of energy, in particular heat.", in especially does not do justice to the facts. It's a unit of energy, in particular food energy, historically defined in terms of heat. JIMp talk· cont 01:26, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
Some people (most recently User:Markus Kuhn, but others in the past as well, such as 121.45.143.14 above) seem to have some weird notions, such as:
That is a crock of nonsense.
hits | |
---|---|
calories site:uk | 320,000 |
kilocalories site:uk | 2,390 |
How many of those 320,000 do you suppose refer to food calories? Gene Nygaard ( talk) 04:02, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
The change to that wording is a slight improvement, Markus Kuhn. But still slightly off. In comparison, note that Resolution 3 of the 9th CGPM (1948) says "The unit of quantity of heat is the joule."
Yet, I doubt seriously that you would claim that this limits the joule to only measure that kind of energy and not any other kind of energy and not the quantity called work (physics). So why are you being so foolish with respect to the calorie? Gene Nygaard ( talk) 13:17, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 |
This: "one Calorie equals 1000 15 °C calories" means what? Isn't is supposed to be one Calorie equals 1000 calories? Qaz I get it now on second reading of the table... answered my own question. Qaz
I would like to see a discussion of how calories are measured in food. Specifically what kind of lab equipment is used and how it works. Does something like this have a place in wikipedia?
I'm not quite sure whether this is accurate:
Firstly, I see from the entry for TNT that it this should be thermochemical calories. Secondly, does that mean that the definition of thermochemical calories is related to the energy released by TNT, or is TNT somehow defined by the energy that is released? If the former, this should be mentioned above where thermochemical calories are first mentioned. If the latter, I fail to understand how this works. I also think we should use a different mass of TNT to avoid the use of billion, which is an ambiguous value (in UK English it traditionally means 10^12, not 10^9 as it is being used here).
I will fix the first and third of these, although feel free to revert me if you disagree. Somebody else really needs to clarify the second.
Instead, what we have is two parallel definitions in the development of these units, with a variation in the quantity of water involved. The pound was used in developing the Btu, but for he metric calories, two different choices were made: a gram of water, or a kilogram of water.
This is somewhat similar to the evolution of moles from "gram molecular weight" or "kilogram molecular weight" or "pound molecular weight" to "gram mole" and "kilogram mole" and "pound mole", with the "gram mole" chosen to be the mole of SI.
The two different classes of calorie have been distinguished by calling them the "large calorie" and the "small calorie", or the "kilogram calorie" and the "gram calorie", and because of the way the use of these units evolved, by calling the large calorie a "foot calorie" or "nutrition calorie".
There is no laziness or word-shortening involved here, with people really meaning to say "kilocalorie" but dropping the "kilo".
Nutritionists don't use prefixes with food calories. So as a result, we end up with prefixes onl used with small calories. As a result, we often end up with the confusing, incongruous clashing of the word "calorie" used with the "kcal" abbreviation. Gene Nygaard 14:12, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
The text still does not accurately reflect that in Europe, there is only one single calorie, and food products are consistently (as required by law) labelled in kcal. The "large calorie" that the article describes as being universally used by nutritionist is very much a U.S. specific measurement. The article has at present a strong U.S.-speciftic point of view with regard to the distinction between a "small" and "large" calorie. I propose to restrict the description about nutritionists using a larger kg-based calorie as a practice limited to some countries, most notably the United States. Markus Kuhn 09:40, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
May I add to this discussion another authoritative reference to counter Gene's peculiar view of the world: NIST Special Publication 811, Appendix B.8: calorie, which says in footnote 12:
So U.S. food calories are "shortened" from kilocalories. The U.S. government at least says so. I rest my case. Markus Kuhn 11:49, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
Contrary to what Markus Kuhn writes now, and various statements made by other editors in the past, there is not a general convention in the United States (nor anywhere else) to write the large calorie as "Calorie" and to use the symbol "Cal" for it.
This is mostly the figment of the imagination of a few chemistry textbook writers, and something not even seen there much any more since most chemistry textbooks have stopped using the small calorie in chemistry. It is not and never was a generally accepted rule. Some chemistry professors still try to teach this in their classes, with little effect. You can throw in an occasional physics professor or textbook author as well, but mostly chemistry.
But chemists don't use large calories, and haven't done so for over half a century at least (and they don't use small calories much any more, either). They forgot to get the people who actually do use the large calorie to play along with their silly game, their attempt to impose a silly rule on the other guy.
Just do an internet search for the use of calorie in the United States, or look at diet books an the like. The word "calorie" is rarely capitalized, unless it starts a sentence or the like. Sure, you will find a small minority of books or internet pages or whatever which do so, but it certainly is not a convention in widespread use.
Of course, the biggest problem is that it is a silly rule in the first place. You cannot tell whether or not the rule is being followed, when the word would be capitalized for other reasons anyway.
I suppose Markus and others are somewhat legitimately confused by United States nutrition labels, where the word calorie is often used not just as a unit of measure, but rather as a synonym for the quantity being measured: food energy. With that substitution, there are generally no unit symbols after the numbers. Especially since the FDA does not encourage the use of joules, and does not even mention them in their labeling regulations, the numbers are usually presented as simply "Calories 130"; there is generally no use of "cal" or Cal" or "kcal" or any other unit symbol on these nutrition labels. It is not generally written in the other order, either. It isn't "130 Calories"; the word "Calorie" starts the line.
Of course, that unit qua quantity is indeed capitalized in that listing of the food energy per serving on most U.S. nutrition labels. But so what? The words "Protein" and "Sodium" and "Sugars" and the like are also capitalized. They are capitalized as the first word of a line in a table. That doesn't tell us anything about whether or not the large calorie is generally capitalized in the United States.
Markus, I imagine you probably have seen that chemistry-textbook rule states somewhere, and imagined it to be confirmed by the capitalization of the listing at the top of a U.S. nutrition label. But it just isn't so.
Just in case you don't have one of those labels handy, and for the benefit of others reading this, an example of these labels can be seen in the Food and Drug Administration web page "How to Understand and Use the Nutrition Facts Label".
Here's the clincher. Guess what else I see on all of those food labels, here in the United States? Look down towards the bottom of the one of these labels. Or look at the examples given for various foods in the bottom half of the FDA page linked to above. Do you see this footnote, which appears with only minor variations on all U.S. nutrition labels?
See? The word "calorie" is not capitalized in this sentence on any of the several labels listed on the FDA web page. I have noticed it capitalized on any label, though I wouldn't be greatly surprised if there are a few, somewhere, which do so.
This article needs to be rewritten, taking into consideration the two misconceptions I have set forth here, and any additional comments anyone else wishes to add here. Gene Nygaard 14:12, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
The use of "calorie" for kilogram calories when discussing food energy is not peculiar to either the United States or to North America. Gene Nygaard 05:55, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
Note that the image on the article page is not a U.S. label, nor a Canadian label. It is a bag of rice from the UK, in Europe. It says
Energy value | 1480 kJ |
(Calories | 350 kcal) |
In the U.S., as in the UK, "calories" and "kcal" are the very same thing when it comes to food. (In the U.S., manufacturers also have many of the same difficulties in getting the proper symbols for the untis of measure, though few if any use kJ so we don't see that specific problem.) Gene Nygaard 06:11, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
More searches
hits | |
---|---|
calories | |
"nine calories per gram" | 920 |
"9 calories per gram" site:.uk | 845 |
"9 cal per gram" | 1,380 |
"9 cals per gram" | 14,600 |
"9 cal/g" | 179 |
"9 cal/gm" | 224 |
"9 cals/g" | 107 (showing 40) |
"9 calories (38 kJ) per gram" | won't do exact search |
"9 calories/gram" | 265 |
"9 cal/gram" | 950 |
kcal | |
"9 kilocalories per gram | 353 |
"9 kilocalories per gram" site:.uk | 4 (showing 3) |
"9 kcal/g" site:.uk | 74 (showing 46) |
"nine kilocalories per gram" | 28 (showing 19) |
"9 kcal per gram | 195 |
"nine kcal per gram" | 25 (showing 5) |
"9 kcal/g" | 13,200 |
"9 kcal/gm" | 589 |
"9 kcal/gram" | 119 |
Using http://www.google.co.uk/ also gives 845 hits for "9 calories per gram" site:.uk Gene Nygaard 14:08, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
Peter Roget, Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, 1911? or later Project Gutenberg
382. Heat -- ...
[thermal units] calorie, gram-calorie, small calorie; kilocalorie,
kilogram calorie, large calorie; British Thermal Unit, B.T.U.; therm,
quad.
Gene Nygaard
15:04, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
Marcus, even a British transplant like you should be more aware of the world around him. I'd like to hear from any native English-speaker from the UK who is willing to stick his or her neck out and claim that it is not common in the UK to use "calories" to mean the large calories when discussing nutrition and diets. Any takers willing to claim that they never or rarely run into this usage? Gene Nygaard 15:30, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
I'm not quite sure whether this is accurate:
Firstly, I see from the entry for TNT that it this should be thermochemical calories. Secondly, does that mean that the definition of thermochemical calories is related to the energy released by TNT, or is TNT somehow defined by the energy that is released? If the former, this should be mentioned above where thermochemical calories are first mentioned. If the latter, I fail to understand how this works. I also think we should use a different mass of TNT to avoid the use of billion, which is an ambiguous value (in UK English it traditionally means 10^12, not 10^9 as it is being used here).
I will fix the first and third of these, although feel free to revert me if you disagree. Somebody else really needs to clarify the second.
It would be nice if the article said where the word "calorie" comes from. EdDavies 19:30, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
anybody knows?
unsigned comment by 209.30.240.182 (25 March 2006)
Please keep the calorie article focused on the unit of measurement for energy of that name, with a few notes on its particular use in food-labeling regulations. More detailed discussions of all other issues related to human nutrition, diet, weight control, etc. really belong into articles of their own. In particular, please do not spam the article with countless URLs to the many advertisement-financed web food/exercise-calories tables out there. Markus Kuhn 17:15, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
Agree with Markus that this category should not be spammed with food calorie table URLs. But to the extent that they are here, marketing claims relating to the numbers of foods should be required to be more detailed and accurate. Most data falls into the following categories:
Specifying separate figures for each category makes it easier to evaluate the quality of each web site's data. for TheDailyPlate, in particular, is really suspect and amounts to a marketing claim by the proprietors of the site. It seems to mostly be data of type #4, mostly from RecipeZaar, which is of dubious use to most people. It also tends to be inaccurate, since RecipeZaar automatically computes calorie counts from ingredients using USDA-derived data, and simply omits ingredients that it cannot match. As a minor side feature of a recipe site, the calorie counts have not been given much attention or priority by RecipeZaar.
Perhaps a format like this would be good:
so how do they calculate "calories burned" when exercising? Seems like there was some equation linking energy with "work" but I don't recall... Anyone know?
I am trying to understand what a calorie is but this contradiction makes definition unclear. Can someone who knows please fix this!? First: A calorie is a unit of measurement for energy. Then: The word "Calorie" is often mis-used to mean "energy" Thanks! user:rusl
I struck the last sentence of the first paragraph, as it was beyond confusing. I think it would be a good idea to spread this understanding of units versus what the units measure, and "Calorie" is a good example of that, but not in the introduction to this specific unit. This confusion only seems to happen with the word "high-calorie", not the word "calorie". One would never say something is tall by saying it's "high-feet", so I think this should be part of the "Calorie" page, but definitely not in the intro.
76.167.124.179
21:56, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
Elevation:
At what elevation does this definition of a calorie apply? We know that the energy required to heat water is greater at higher elevations, but I don't see/know anything about if there is a standard in this definition. If there is not, it seems like the definition in fact defines very poorly. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
TooManyTooMuch (
talk •
contribs)
21:39, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
so how do they calculate "calories burned" when exercising? Seems like there was some equation linking energy with "work" but I don't recall... Anyone know?
ilable, you divide the answer by the unit you want it in (4.2ish J for the short calorie, 4200ish J for the long Calorie used in food labelling).
Why is the fat measured by the weight of animal that consumes, as opposed to the SI unit for water which is volume??
The calorie is measured by the mass of the water it heats because water's density depends on its temperature. If you were defining the calorie by the volume of the water, you would have to choose whether to use the starting volume of the water or the end volume (after it's been heated by 1 °C).
How is it that a kcal is equivalent to 1 cal when it is also listed as 1000 cal.
I think there is a mistake in citing the number of calories in a pound of body fat. It should be 3500 kcal and 3500 calories.
This helped me! It comes from Spanish Wiki...
1 kcal = 1 Cal = 1000 cal = 4,184 kJ = 4.184 J-- Arcillaroja ( talk) 17:12, 2 November 2008 (UTC)
I've restored the units to the definition of a calorie (little c), because (a) that's what the international definition is, and (b) 1 mL of water is 1 g only at specific temperatures (technically only one temperature value). -- MarcoTolo 20:47, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
I believe this article has reached a high level of maturity and there is little further to improve. The vast majority of edits that we see make it worse and seem to be done by people who do not even bother to read the full article, the references or the talks page. In fact, I now find it regularly necessary to undo about month worth of edits just to keep it in good shape. I think it would be a good idea to give the article some more protected status at this point. Markus Kuhn 10:32, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
The introductory paragraph of this article contained a comment to the effect that a given number of calories could be expected to produce a certain weight gain in the average person. Given that this makes no reference to exercise, or to the food type whereby that energy is consumed (fat is more likely to be stored and result in weight gain than is carbohydrate, in moderate quantities), and given that the comment was dramatically out of keeping with the subject matter of the rest of the paragraph (discussed energy, units, the use as a measure of food energy, and then suddenly a comment on weight gain), I decided that the comment was both spurious and stylistically incongruous, and deleted it. I really don't think it belongs there. cmsg —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 86.31.109.93 ( talk) 01:22, 23 April 2007 (UTC).
I also agree with the statement that there's no cause to highlight in the first paragraph the distinction between a quantity, and a unit thereof.
BUT isn't there recent research calling into question this traditional conclusion that fat is more likely to be stored than carbs? Isn't there research calling into question the correctness of traditional calorie counts of food, because the original research methodology for measuring these calories is not equivalent to the biological processes within the human body? Shouldn't there be reference to these controversies in the article?
1 calINT = 4.1868 J (1 J = 0.23885 calIT) 1 calth = 4.184 J (1 J = 0.23901 calth) 1 cal15 = 4.18580 J (1 J = 0.23890 cal15)
Can someone explain what the subscripts mean?
1 pound is equivalent to approximately .45 kgs, so the weekly kcal deficit or surplus to lose/gain one kg should be less than that required to lose one pound.
According to the paged sourced, http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001940.htm , the weekly deficit/surplus required to lose/gain one kg/week is around 1600 kcal. (0.45359237 x 3500 kcal). That translates to a reduction of 500 kcal/day to lose one pound a week, and approximately 230 kcal/day to lose one kg.
A reduction in calorie intake by 7800 kcal/week, a reduction of more than 1000 kcal/day, is potentially dangerous. Maybe it should also be specified that the numbers stated are per week and not day, since they could get mixed up. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.113.219.51 ( talk) 21:37, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Are these all kcal or cal? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.167.218.224 ( talk) 12:00, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
Counter comment on discussion above I think this comment is total hooey. If you reduce your calorie intake by 500 calories below a maintenance level, you turn off your metabolism, which makes weight loss more difficult. Moreover calories, i.e. the amount of heat produced when foods are tested in oxidation reactions in a laboratory, have little or nothing to do with how food is metabolized in the body.
According to this article there are many kinds. But, which ones are used to measure food energy(at least for U.S. food companies). 207.177.111.36 ( talk) 15:01, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
I looked all over the internets and couldn't find clear sources for kcal/grams of fat, protein or carbohydrates. Some books that I've read say that carbohydrates are actually 3.75kcal/g. Needs clarification and citation. Thanks-- 70.74.82.114 ( talk) 22:58, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
Most people coming to this article will be looking for the definition of Calorie (that's large Calorie, the one used to measure food energy content), which is a kilocalorie. This article does not make the distinction very clear. That's because it's a mish-mash of rubbish written by obsessive nerds with no mind for the target audience of, or proper scope for an encyclopaedic article. Ah well, I suppose that this is Wikipedia.
Wikipedia (n): A mish-mash of rubbish written by obsessive nerds with no mind for the target audience of, or proper scope for an encyclopaedic article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.45.143.14 ( talk) 11:31, 16 March 2008 (UTC)
So in case a peanut butter producer adds the funny unit again into this article I post my modification here so that people can re-correct it if they like... let's hope that we consumers win this battle and not the PR departments of high energy yummy foods :) - alternatively we could - just for fun - start introduce "large" meters or grams on the other unit definition pages - this would be fun or at least a great joke and some industries will love it!
So here is my suggested and saved version for those interested in providing serious information:
One calorie (symbol: cal) is the amount of heat (energy) needed to increase the temperature of one gram of water by 1 °C. 1 cal is about 4184 J. "J" is the symbol for the official unit for energy, the "Joule". 1 kcal = 1000cal hence 1kcal is 4184 kJ. "k" is the official pre fix for units meaning "kilo" or a 1000 units of something e.g. 1kg = 1000g.
[Note, in recent decades the unit "calorie" has been "modified" (presumably for marketing purposes in the food industry) to conceal high energy content in food and confuse customers - especially in developed countries with high numbers of overweight people.]
Sometimes, on food labels, you may find "calorie" spelled with a large "C" e.g. "Calorie" or "Cal" to hide the fact that it contains actually 1000 calories - not just "one" calorie. The "inventors" of this unit gave it the name "large calorie" sometimes also referred to as "kilogram calorie". As this "unit" only works in writing - and is completely unnecessary - it makes no sense to use it other than confuse consumers.
The "calorie" - as opposed to the official energy unit "Joule" - is commonly used to express food energy, e.g. when discussing dieting or nutrition plans or simply reading the energy content on food labels. This is probably because 2500 kcal is smaller than 10000 kJ, the recommended energy intake for an adult person per day. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.245.124.221 ( talk) 17:58, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
Revision as of 21:51, 27 February 2008 by User:Unfree was anything but "Minor rewording". Amongst other things,
A calorie is a unit of measurement for energy.
was changed to
This is a major change. The unit now only applies to energy in the form of heat. Has the unit been dropped from nutritional labels recently? Food energy is certainly not a form of heat. I'll be reverting this substantial change. J ɪ m p 07:36, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
Both current use and historical use should be thoroughly covered. The current version of the article doesn't do this. The first sentence, "The calorie is a pre-SI unit of energy, in particular heat.", in especially does not do justice to the facts. It's a unit of energy, in particular food energy, historically defined in terms of heat. JIMp talk· cont 01:26, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
Some people (most recently User:Markus Kuhn, but others in the past as well, such as 121.45.143.14 above) seem to have some weird notions, such as:
That is a crock of nonsense.
hits | |
---|---|
calories site:uk | 320,000 |
kilocalories site:uk | 2,390 |
How many of those 320,000 do you suppose refer to food calories? Gene Nygaard ( talk) 04:02, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
The change to that wording is a slight improvement, Markus Kuhn. But still slightly off. In comparison, note that Resolution 3 of the 9th CGPM (1948) says "The unit of quantity of heat is the joule."
Yet, I doubt seriously that you would claim that this limits the joule to only measure that kind of energy and not any other kind of energy and not the quantity called work (physics). So why are you being so foolish with respect to the calorie? Gene Nygaard ( talk) 13:17, 31 March 2008 (UTC)