24/11/2019
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Calories ā What are calories?
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Put simply, calories are energy. Yep thatās pretty much it, calories are just a unit we use to calculate the little micro explosions caused to extract nutrients from our food. You canāt see calories, you canāt taste calories, theyāre simply a reaction and how we measure the heat produced by extracting those nutrients š¤Æ.
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Funnily enough some idiots decided to confuse the masses with what we think calories are. On the back of our food labels we actually see our food measured in ākilocaloriesā not calories. So, if a label says 200 ācaloriesā itās actually 200 kilocalories and 200,000 calories. Let just stop here before it gets too confusing.
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For the sake of simplicity I will be referring to everything as calories.
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But what makes up those calories? Well when we dig deeper we come to the āmacronutrientsā that make up those calories. So, here it is.
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ā¢ 1 gram of protein = 4 calories
ā¢ 1 gram of carbohydrate = 4 calories
ā¢ 1 gram of fat = 9 calories
ā¢ 1 gram of alcohol = 7 calories
ā¢ 1 gram of fibre = 4 calories
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Each of these components provide us energy.
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Ever see on a food labels that something has 32 grams of carbs? 32x4 = 128 calories.
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To be continuedā¦
