Food, Calories, and Vitamins
Bill Bryson’s awesome book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants , has a chapter titled “Food, Glorious Food”. It starts with the topic of calories: “We all know that if we consume too much beer and cake and pizza and cheeseburgers and all the other things that make life frankly worth living, we will add pounds to our bodies because we have taken in too many calories.” The weird thing about the unit we call ‘calorie’ in the context of food is that it’s really kilocalorie in physics lingo! That’s the amount of energy needed to heat 1 kg of water by 1˚ C: “But it seems safe to say that no one ever thinks of it in those terms when deciding what foods to eat.” The father of the caloric measurement was Wilbur Atwater. He did his study at a time when people thought the only purpose of food was to give energy: “Nobody yet understood the concept of vitamins and minerals or even the need for a balanced diet.” Thus, he concluded wrongly that a pure meat diet was better than one wi...