People keep talking about calories all the time. How many calories are
in this burger? How many are burned by 50 push-ups? So, what is a calorie, and
how many calories do we need to survive?
First, a calorie is a method of keeping track of the body's energy budget. If we put in about as much energy as we burn, we can achieve a healthy balance. However, if we keep putting more energy into our bodies than we lose, we will produce fat; consequently, we will gain weight and vice versa. One calorie ,the kind we measure in food, represents the amount of energy it takes to increase the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. All food we consume has a calorie count. For example, A pizza slice has around 285 calories, a banana has about 89. We release that energy when we digest food, then we store it in other molecules to be broken down and produce energy when the body requires it. We can use that energy in three possible ways: 10% to enable digestion, about 20% to do physical activity, and around 70% is used to help the basic functions of the tissues and organs. That third usage represents your basal metabolic rate which is the number of calories required to survive if you weren't moving around or consuming food. By adding digestion and some physical activity, you can know how many calories the average person needs per day: 2500 for men and 2000 for women according to the official guidelines. These numbers are based on factors like muscle mass, physical activity, and average weight. Consequently, not everybody should shoot for around 2000 calories. For instance, elderly people burn energy more gradually because they typically have a slower metabolic rate, so less is needed. Your body could use up to 9000 calories each day if you're doing an intense activity such as cycling in the city. On the other hand, pregnancy needs slightly more calories than usual. Before you begin counting calories, here's something else you should keep in mind. The calorie counts on nutrition labels do not tell you how much energy you can actually get out of food, but how much energy there is in the food. Food like whole wheat and celery use more energy to digest; therefore a 100-calorie serving of potato chips can provide you with more energy than a 100-calorie serving of celery. It goes without saying that some foods provide nutrients like protein and vitamins, whereas others offer far less nutritional value. Consequently, consuming a lot of these foods could make you malnourished and overweight. However, even with the exact same amount of food, different people might not get the same number of calories. Since people have different enzyme levels, gut bacteria, and even intestine length which makes every individual extract energy from food differently.
A calorie is a valuable energy measure, but we have to consider in things like food type, exercise, and our body's ability to process energy, to figure out exactly how many of them each one of us needs.
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