Miscounted Calories?

When it comes to weight loss, a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. That’s been the mantra of nutritionists, dietitians, and food regulators in the United States and Europe for more than a century. But when it comes to comparing raw food with cooked food, or beans with breakfast cereals, that thinking may be incorrect. That was the consensus of a panel of researchers who listed the many ways that the math doesn’t always add up correctly on food labels on Feb. 18 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “Our current system for assessing calories is surely wrong,” said evolutionary biologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, the co-organizer of the panel.

Read the rest of Ann Gibbons here.