You know those calorie counts on the nutrition labels that appear on food packaging and also, thanks to Obamacare, restaurant menus? The ones that the federal government wants you to use as indicated in their instructions below before each and every single time you ever eat?
Science says those "Nutrition Facts" labels are wrong. All of them.
Almost every packaged food today features calorie counts in its label. Most of these counts are inaccurate because they are based on a system of averages that ignores the complexity of digestion.
Recent research reveals that how many calories we extract from food depends on which species we eat, how we prepare our food, which bacteria are in our gut and how much energy we use to digest different foods.
Current calorie counts do not consider any of these factors. Digestion is so intricate that even if we try to improve calorie counts, we will likely never make them perfectly accurate.
So if you're trying to reach or maintain a particular weight, those labels aren't going to do you very much good, are they?
Definitely not if you use them the way most nutritionists would have you use them, which perhaps shouldn't be a surprise given the close association that has developed between spurious nutrition claims, including many of those issued by the U.S. government, and junk science. And of course, because such people are usually unhappy and petty little power mad tyrants, what they want you to do is to document the calorie/carb/fat/salt/fiber/et cetera content of everything you eat, as you eat it, in a food diary so your shameful behavior is fully documented so that your guilt can be counted upon to motivate you to achieve your desired weight. Mainly because it makes them feel better.
That's despite their knowing that kind of calorie counting can really be considered to be a kind of eating disorder all its own. Worse, that food journal you might have diligently worked to document your food sins is really just a book of lies, because every nutrition label is wrong.
What if we could get you to your goal weight without all the guilt and hassle? And if you like, by eating the same food you eat today and maintaining the same activity level, with just some simple adjustments in the amounts of food you eat?
It turns out that there's a super simple way to estimate not just how many calories your body is currently effectively consuming, the same math can be done to estimate how many calories you would need to eat on average each day to reach and maintain your "ideal" or target weight.
Let's just get straight to it, shall we? Enter your current and "ideal" weight in our tool below, or if you're reading this on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, click through to a working version of our tool at our site, and we'll do the math.
For your results, the "Percent Adjustment" is the amount by which you would need to alter the amount of food that you eat today to reach your target weight over time, assuming that you maintain the same level of activity as you do today and continue to eat the same diet. Given what real science says about how how human metabolism works, the reading on your scale should slowly drift in the direction you want it to go.
See? Minimal grief! And the best part is that you no longer have to rely on junk nutrition "science" to work out both what and how much you should be eating or waste any of your valuable time either reading U.S. government-mandated "nutrition facts" labels or documenting what they indicate your calorie consumption is.
After all, your body is also saying that information is all wrong. You'll never get anywhere you really want to go by buying into a premise that's false to begin with.
Previously on Political Calculations
Elsewhere on the Interwebs
Added 24 March 2017: Habit Nest's Ari Banayan reviews math and strategies that can be used to be successful in achieving desired weight loss.
Added 24 March 2017: Dilbert cartoonist and business book author Scott Adams describes how two changes to your thought process can rework your psychology to promote both better eating and easier weight loss if those are your goals.
Labels: food, junk science, tool
Welcome to the blogosphere's toolchest! Here, unlike other blogs dedicated to analyzing current events, we create easy-to-use, simple tools to do the math related to them so you can get in on the action too! If you would like to learn more about these tools, or if you would like to contribute ideas to develop for this blog, please e-mail us at:
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