cheryl
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There’s No Such Thing as an Empty Calorie - Outside
All food serves a purpose
Imagine you’re a nutrition expert with an advanced degree and years of research experience. You understand the chemical processes within our bodies and the connection between nutrition and population health. Your job is to communicate what you know with millions of people who don’t understand these things at all.
It’s a huge challenge to turn complex and imperfect nutrition science into simple guidelines. Sometimes it works. For example, thousands of studies linking fruit and vegetable consumption to lowered risk of various diseases have been synthesized into a widely accepted recommendation to eat five servings of them a day. But in other cases, the details get oversimplified in ways that are misleading and ineffective. Case in point: the recommendation to limit empty calories.
While some calories do pack less of a nutritional punch than others, the idea of an empty or useless calorie is an unproductive way to think about food. In fact, some experts believe it might actually do more harm than good. If you’re worried about the so-called empty calories in your diet, or you’re confused about what they actually do, here’s what you need to know.
All food serves a purpose
Imagine you’re a nutrition expert with an advanced degree and years of research experience. You understand the chemical processes within our bodies and the connection between nutrition and population health. Your job is to communicate what you know with millions of people who don’t understand these things at all.
It’s a huge challenge to turn complex and imperfect nutrition science into simple guidelines. Sometimes it works. For example, thousands of studies linking fruit and vegetable consumption to lowered risk of various diseases have been synthesized into a widely accepted recommendation to eat five servings of them a day. But in other cases, the details get oversimplified in ways that are misleading and ineffective. Case in point: the recommendation to limit empty calories.
While some calories do pack less of a nutritional punch than others, the idea of an empty or useless calorie is an unproductive way to think about food. In fact, some experts believe it might actually do more harm than good. If you’re worried about the so-called empty calories in your diet, or you’re confused about what they actually do, here’s what you need to know.