Coca Cola has a series of television advertisements trumpeting their anti-obesity campaign. It highlights their many products with few or no calories (such as water) and the fact that they now provide many products, such as Coca Cola itself, in smaller cans.
They go on to say that all calories are the same regardless of source. If you take in more calories than you use, you will gain weight. And they would like to be part of the dialogue.
A while back, Stephen Colbert had a guest on who had a very different view of calories taking Coca Cola to task.
Dr. Lustig was promoting his book "Fat Chance" by telling people the "truth about calories". Indeed, in the interview with Stephen Colbert, he repeatedly made the point that a calorie is not a calorie.
Other than the straight up rhetorical nonsense of that statement, it is at best disingenuous and at worst an outright falsification.
He started by saying: "You eat 160 calories in almonds but you only absorb 130. The fibre in the almonds delays absorption of calories into the bloodstream, delivering those calories to the bacteria in your intestine, which chew them up. Because a calorie is not a calorie."
A calorie is simply a measure of the amount of heat energy available from a particular substance when it is combusted. It is the amount of energy or heat required to raise 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. Nothing more, nothing less.
More to the point, food is measured in "Calories" and not "calories". The difference between big "C" calorie and little "c" calorie is that the Calorie used in measuring food is 1000 times bigger. That is, a food Calorie is the amount of energy required to increase 1,000 grams of water by 1 degree Celsius. Again, nothing more, nothing less.
The number of Calories that you can utilize from a particular food item - such as an almond or apple - is not necessarily related to the Calorie content of the almond or apple. A small block of wood might have thousands of Calories but none that can be absorbed by your body.
This does not change the Calorie count of the block of wood nor lead to the implication that a "calorie is not a calorie".
Generally speaking, the more Calories that you take in, the more that are available for absorption and the more that you utilize. For most foods, the ratio between the Calorie content of the food and the Calorie content you can utilize varies in the 80% to 100% range.
It depends upon all sorts of factors, such as fibre content and solubility. But one of the things that one wants to avoid is overfeeding the microbes in the digestive tract. It has rather unfortunate consequences.
Dr. Lustig went on to say: "When it comes to food, you have to put energy in to get energy out. You have to put twice as much energy in to metabolize protein as you carbohydrate; this is called the thermic effect of food. So protein wastes more energy in it processing."
Not quite true. The carbon content balances out to exactly the same number. Protein uses up more energy because of processing the waste products. That is, protein doesn't waste energy but protein waste requires energy for disposal.
Unfortunately, excessive protein puts a heavy strain on the liver and kidneys. Protein rich diets can do significant damage and even result in premature death. A balanced diet including carbohydrates, proteins, fats, minerals, and vitamins is a far healthier way to eat.
As to Dr. Lustig's reference to sugar, he stated that sugar is not one chemical, it is two. Actually, sugar is a term like salt that is used to describe a large class of chemical compounds. Sugars come in many, many forms.
Consider ribose or deoxyribose which are linking units in RNA and DNA, respectively. Both are five carbon sugars. Then there are sugars such as lactose, galactose, maltose, and a number of others all found in foods.
The statement that sugar is not one compound is factually correct. There are many types of sugar. But the sugar that is typically found in most foods is either sucrose - a disaccharide composed of the condensation product of glucose and fructose - or glucose and fructose individually.
Dr. Lustig then suggested that fructose is bad for you. That it damages the liver because that is the only place that it can be metabolized. "Fructose is an entirely different animal" he said.
Yes, but if it is bad for you then all of the people that eat honey on a regular basis are in trouble.
The problem is that neither Dr. Lustig nor Coca Cola are really telling you the whole truth. Instead, they are trying to sell you something.
