CALORIE

From: August 9, 2025

CALORIE has captured our notions of quantifying energy in food for more than a century. Food was considered fuel. In the eighteenth century, Antoine Lavoisier proposed that respiration is combustion, no different from a candle burning, and devised an ice calorimeter to house a guinea pig to test his theory! Nicolas Clément-Desormes coined “calorie” in relation to heat engines. A century later, Wilbur Atwater went on to calculate the energy values of foods which remain in use today.

Why count calories? The first reasons were to manage absenteeism and loss of productivity in workhouses. Bread, meat, and leisure, earlier argued for as concerns of justice, became matters of efficiency and cost. Food became uniform and comparable between people, nations, and time periods: it became the state’s obligation to manage food inventory and the dietary needs of the population. Food became comparable between bodies and twentieth century diet fads took off!

Food is not only fuel. Our understanding of the composition of food and how the body processes it has moved on. A simple model of combustion has been replaced by a complex understanding of nutrition and nutrigenomics. Numbers logged in your fit-bit or food labels are at best honest guesses. It is no longer simply true that to “lose weight you must use up more calories than you take in.”

A calorie is not only a calorie. Join us to find out!