Ask for a detailed food calorie meter to keep in your phone

A food calorie meter is a list of the amount of energy contained in a unit of food (such as 100 grams) that is drawn or listed for easy reference in dietary health. Different foods produce different amounts of energy.

As shown in the table below: <>

The amount of calories contained in food is not equal to the amount of calories absorbed.

Richard Langham, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University in the United States, has studied the calories contained in food and the digestion and absorption of these calories. I don't know if I don't study it, and when I studied it, I was shocked to find that the heat meter was full of errors.

The food calorie meter used to estimate calories is actually made by the American agricultural chemist Wilbur Orin Atwater in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It's a very simple system, protein is calculated at 4 calories per gram, fat is calculated at 9 calories per gram, carbohydrates are calculated at 4 calories per gram, and later supplemented by 2 calories per gram for fiber.

With the unit calories of these ingredients, the total calories of a food are the sum of the calories of the various ingredients it contains. This is where the food calorie meter comes from.

Lanham found that the biggest problem with the system was inaccurate caloric estimates of cooked food. Historically, cooked food was generally considered to contain fewer calories than raw food because some of the food components were lost in the cooking process.

However, in the case of meat, the process of cooking the food gels the collagen in the meat, making it easier to chew and digest.

In terms of the amount of energy it takes to digest food, digesting cooked food takes about 5% to 30% less energy than raw food, not counting the reduction in stomach acid use. Since cooked food reduces the amount of energy it takes to digest food, Langham argues that cooked food should contain more calories than raw food when calculating calories, rather than the other way around.

Similar to meat, macro-high temperatures denature the proteins in some vegetables such as potatoes, making them easier to digest by the digestive tract and increasing the amount of calories that can be absorbed.

The way food is handled is critical to the absorption of heat. For example, some barley and beans contain starch that takes a long time to digest. But the same barley and beans are very easy to digest and absorb if they are processed into powder or into something that can be instantaneous, such as cereal porridge powder and bean flour.

According to rough estimates by scholars, if the volume of the food block is doubled for the same food, then the amount of energy required to digest the food will also be roughly doubled. This is why bread is easy to digest and beans are difficult to digest, the former is made with flour and the latter remains in its original state.

In addition, the decomposition of intestinal bacteria also has an important impact on the digestion and absorption of food. The speed at which the food itself passes through the digestive tract can also be fast and slow, some can get enough time to digest, and some are excreted before they can be digested. These factors need to be taken into account when calculating caloric intake.