Calorie Schmalorie: A Calorie is NOT Just a Calorie
In 1918, when Lulu Hunt Peters published her best-selling “Diet and Health: With Key to the Calories,” she was offering American women her personal solution to being overweight. After Peters earned her medical degree from Berkeley in 1908, she decided to use calorie counting and self-control to cure her lifelong struggle with obesity. Her solution helped her shed 32 kilograms (70.5 pounds!) and America’s hard-to-shake belief that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie was launched.
For decades, nutritionists said that to lose weight and keep it off, you must take in fewer calories daily than you burn.
While that is kind of true, recently we’ve begun to unravel the more complex ways that different nutrients and substances affect your metabolism, appetite, blood sugar, gut biome, immune system and inflammation level. As a result, we now know that the source of your calories (and when you eat them) matters for many aspects of your health and wellbeing: your weight, your cognition, your mood, your cardio system, your digestion, your microbiome, your longevity and even your sex life!
A hundred calories of the following nutrients exert wildly different effects on the body:
100 calories of lean protein: Found in fish and skinless poultry, legumes, nonfat dairy, tofu, nuts, egg whites and whole grains, lean proteins help control appetite and weight, steady blood sugar levels and reduce your risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes and build muscle.