The hard, waxy outer shell of a SnackWell’s Devil’s Food Cookie Pie is something I can remember with all five senses: the sound when I tapped my fingernails on its hard exterior, the smell when I opened it, the fluffy quality of its crumbs. under my fingers and then my teeth. The “cookie” approached a satisfaction benchmark, but never quite reached it. Throughout my childhood, this was my midday treat, and although the revamped formula claim (it is to be “better than ever”, I know that I, for my part, always wanted something much better. Over time, and with a subtle change in the way I fit food into my daily routine, I have managed to disconnect from the SnackWell’s of the world.
An important thing to know about the (very profitable) diet food industry is that it is based on the notion of the calorie as a significant marker of health and nutrition, which, increasingly, it is not. In fact, over the last decade, much has been written to support the idea that calories are basically nothing more than…vibrations?
Why doesn’t calorie counting work?
“Even if two people eat the same sweet potato or the same piece of meat cooked in the same way, they will not get the same number of calories,” Rob Dunn wrote for american scientist in 2013. There are many reasons for this, including the size of the intestine, the presence of certain digestive enzymes, and general differences in metabolism from one person to another. So Nabisco’s dreaded 100-calorie pack may not even provide a measly 100-calorie sustenance when you need it.
Not that “100 calories” is necessarily the right recipe for anyone’s average waistline.snack first. like the podcast Maintenance Phase explained in a recent episode called “The problem with calories,” co-host Aubrey Gordon explains that the measure has pierced us since the dawn of the Nutrition Facts label: 2,000 calories per day.not indicative how much fuel our body needs to function properly.
“The FDA says they didn’t really intend this 2,000 calories per day to be a nutritional guideline,” says Gordon. “They said they designed it to be a popular education tool…That means it was designed to make it easy for consumers to understand what was in food, but it wasn’t necessarily meant to be like, ‘here’s the hard and fast information,’ would not be a recommendation for every individual who needs to eat 2,000 calories a day.” (Quotes from the episode can be found here.)
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When the US government began formulating the “Nutrition Facts” labels now found on all packaged food products, the USDA conducted surveys to see how many calories Americans typically consumed in a day. Responses varied greatly, with women reporting 1,600-2,200 calories per day and men reporting 2,000-3,000 calories per day.
Know what we know about self-report bias, we can reasonably assume that the actual number of calories consumed was greater than that, or at least unlikely to be at the lower end of those ranges. But how the atlantic Explain, the number 2,000 was chosen instead of the 2,350 initially proposed because it was a neat, round number and less likely to “encourage excessive consumption”, among other reasons. In other words, you’re being preemptively scolded for a number of foods you haven’t yet consumed, but might need to function in your daily life.
Combine the shaky foundations of the calorie label with our bodies’ uneven processing of those calories, and you have to ask yourself: why? Why do we limit ourselves to numbers that don’t care if we’re depriving ourselves or not?
For many people, the answer might be that in those raw numbers lies a sense of control. And I understand that; We put so much hope and prayer into the idea that with enough discipline, our bodies could eventually become efficient machines capable of processing exact inputs into exact outputs, a 1:1 ratio of behavior to results 100% of the time. But food is not the only input that our body must process. You are being asked to function despite varying levels of stress, sleep, pollution, all of which may require more than 100 calories from a packet of carob chip fries to endure.
I’m not saying that people shouldn’t think about what they eat; I’m saying that calorie labels are not the way to track that, and never have been. It’s a subtle shift in perspective, but it allows you to find your own way to satisfy your hunger. And, of course, understand that your hunger deserves to be satisfied.
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