Talk:Calorie

Contradictory first paragraph

I am trying to understand what a calorie is but this contradiction makes definition unclear. Can someone who knows please fix this!? First: A calorie is a unit of measurement for energy. Then: The word "Calorie" is often mis-used to mean "energy" Thanks! user:rusl

There is no contradiction here: "calorie" is the name of a unit of measurement (a reference measure), while "energy" is the name of a quantity (something that can be measured). Some people fail to see the conceptual difference between quantities and units and misuse the names of units (such as "calories") to denote quantities. They say "this snack contains a lot of calories" instead of "this snack contains a lot of energy". (The lack of distinction between unit and quantity is particularly pronounced in American English, where a common remedy seems to be to add the suffix "-age" to a unit name to turn it into a quantity, e.g. "amperage" and "footage" for quantities such as current and length.) Markus Kuhn 12:47, 22 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

While the units of measurement are different from quantities, I still believe both of the above mentioned sentences are basically correct. Even if they are not, I don't see how it is a significant enough issue to warrant inclusion in the article, let alone the first paragraph. If anywhere, perhaps it should be in units of measurement. Benna 02:47, 29 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Scope

Please keep the calorie article focused on the unit of measurement for energy of that name, with a few notes on its particular use in food-labeling regulations. More detailed discussions of all other issues related to human nutrition, diet, weight control, etc. really belong into articles of their own. In particular, please do not spam the article with countless URLs to the many advertisement-financed web food/exercise-calories tables out there. Markus Kuhn 17:15, 14 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Web-based calorie sites

Agree with Markus that this category should not be spammed with food calorie table URLs. But to the extent that they are here, marketing claims relating to the numbers of foods should be required to be more detailed and accurate. Most data falls into the following categories:

Basic foods (usually from the USDA list)
Restaurant foods
Packaged foods, from the Nutrition Facts labels
Composite data, usually computed for recipes

Specifying separate figures for each category makes it easier to evaluate the quality of each web site's data. The claim of 90,000 data for TheDailyPlate, in particular, is really suspect and amounts to a marketing claim by the proprietors of the site. It seems to mostly be data of type #4, mostly from RecipeZaar, which is of dubious use to most people. It also tends to be inaccurate, since RecipeZaar automatically computes calorie counts from ingredients using USDA-derived data, and simply omits ingredients that it cannot match. As a minor side feature of a recipe site, the calorie counts have not been given much attention or priority by RecipeZaar.

Perhaps a format like this would be good:

Mr. Calorie. Claims 45,000 calorie data as follows: USDA basic foods; 5,000 items from 50 chains updated quarterly; 10,000 items from 100 chains screen-scraped from competing web sites and not updated (includes duplicates); 13,000 packaged foods, 2,000 entered by our staff, 11,000 screen-scraped from other web sites; 10,000 recipe calories from RecipeZaar

so how do they calculate "calories burned" when exercising? Seems like there was some equation linking energy with "work" but I don't recall... Anyone know?

Question: Calories Burned? is there an equation somewhere?

so how do they calculate "calories burned" when exercising? Seems like there was some equation linking energy with "work" but I don't recall... Anyone know?

energy = work Markus Kuhn 10:25, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Question: Calories

Why is the calorie measured by the weight of water it heats, as opposed to the SI unit for water which is volume??

1kg water equals 1 liter water, so it doesn't really matter

In any case, the calorie isn't an SI unit. If you want to comply with SI standards, you have to use the Joule instead, and the only reason most people don't is because consumers have gotten so used to using calories, the same way they're used to pounds and miles.

Actually 1 kg water is just approx. 1 liter. Also it would be nice to have an exact value onhow many Joule a Calorie is.

1. 1. It is difficult to say how many joules a calorie is. A 15° calorie is 4.1858 joules, and the international steam table (IT) calorie (4.1868 joules). There are also other types of calorie. In bomb calorimetry which is used to calculate enthalpies of chemicals (and foods ie. their calorific content, a calorie is defined as the amount of heat liberated on combustion of 1g of pure benzoic acid.)NB- water can also be used in bomb calorimetry of food83.245.22.39 17:02, 3 January 2007 (UTC)AB83.245.22.39 15:10, 3 January 2007 (UTC) ####[reply]

Kcal

How is it that a kcal is equivalent to 1 cal when it is also listed as 1000 cal.

I think there is a mistake in citing the number of calories in a pound of body fat. It should be 3500 kcal and 3500 calories.

Grams and kilograms

I've restored the units to the definition of a calorie (little c), because (a) that's what the international definition is, and (b) 1 mL of water is 1 g only at specific temperatures (technically only one temperature value). -- MarcoTolo 20:47, 5 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Mature article

I believe this article has reached a high level of maturity and there is little further to improve. The vast majority of edits that we see make it worse and seem to be done by people who do not even bother to read the full article, the references or the talks page. In fact, I now find it regularly necessary to undo about month worth of edits just to keep it in good shape. I think it would be a good idea to give the article some more protected status at this point. Markus Kuhn 10:32, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Calories and weight gain

The introductory paragraph of this article contained a comment to the effect that a given number of calories could be expected to produce a certain weight gain in the average person. Given that this makes no reference to exercise, or to the food type whereby that energy is consumed (fat is more likely to be stored and result in weight gain than is carbohydrate, in moderate quantities), and given that the comment was dramatically out of keeping with the subject matter of the rest of the paragraph (discussed energy, units, the use as a measure of food energy, and then suddenly a comment on weight gain), I decided that the comment was both spurious and stylistically incongruous, and deleted it. I really don't think it belongs there. cmsg —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 86.31.109.93 (talk) 01:22, 23 April 2007 (UTC).[reply]

I also agree with the statement that there's no cause to highlight in the first paragraph the distinction between a quantity, and a unit thereof.