Department of Agriculture found that when people eat almonds, they receive just 129 calories per serving rather than the 170 calories reported on the label. Studies suggest that peanuts, pistachios and almonds are less completely digested than other foods with similar levels of proteins, carbohydrates and fats, meaning they relinquish fewer calories than one would expect. After all, seeds and nuts need to survive the guts of birds, bats, rodents and monkeys to spread the genes they contain. It also favored nuts and seeds that were hard to digest, however. Evolution favored fruits that were both tasty and easy to digest to better attract animals that could help plants scatter seeds. Fruits and nuts first evolved in the Cretaceous (between 145 and 65 million years ago), not long after mammals were beginning to run between the legs of dinosaurs. Some plant parts have evolved adaptations either to make themselves more appetizing to animals or to evade digestion altogether. When cell walls hold strong, foods hoard their precious calories and pass through our body intact (think corn). Cooking easily ruptures cells in, say, spinach and zucchini, but cassava ( Manihot esculenta) or Chinese water chestnut ( Eleocharis dulcis) is much more resistant. Generally speaking, the weaker or more degraded the cell walls in the plant material we eat, the more calories we get from it. Older leaves tend to have sturdier cell walls than young ones. Even within a single plant, the durability of cell walls can differ. The walls of plant cells in the stems and leaves of some species are much tougher than those in other species. We eat the stems, leaves and roots of hundreds of different plants. Every food is digested in its own way.Ĭonsider how vegetables vary in their digestibility. Atwater was doing his best, but no food is average. The flaws in modern calorie counts originated in the 19th century, when American chemist Wilbur Olin Atwater developed a system, still used today, for calculating the average number of calories in one gram of fat, protein and carbohydrate. Nutrition scientists are beginning to learn enough to hypothetically improve calorie labels, but digestion turns out to be such a fantastically complex and messy affair that we will probably never derive a formula for an infallible calorie count. To accurately calculate the total calories that someone gets out of a given food, you would have to take into account a dizzying array of factors, including whether that food has evolved to survive digestion how boiling, baking, microwaving or flambéing a food changes its structure and chemistry how much energy the body expends to break down different kinds of food and the extent to which the billions of bacteria in the gut aid human digestion and, conversely, steal some calories for themselves. New research has revealed that this assumption is, at best, far too simplistic. Yet these approximations assume that the 19th-century laboratory experiments on which they are based accurately reflect how much energy different people with different bodies derive from many different kinds of food. Fiber offers a piddling two calories because enzymes in the human digestive tract have great difficulty chopping it up into smaller molecules.Įvery calorie count on every food label you have ever seen is based on these estimates or on modest derivations thereof. Fats provide approximately nine calories per gram, whereas carbohydrates and proteins deliver just four. We calculate the available energy in all foods with a unit known as the food calorie, or kilocalorie-the amount of energy required to heat one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. Our cells use the energy stored in the chemical bonds of these simpler molecules to carry on business as usual. Digestive enzymes in the mouth, stomach and intestines break up complex food molecules into simpler structures, such as sugars and amino acids that travel through the bloodstream to all our tissues. Although it did not occur to me at the time, I later realized that humans, too, engage in a kind of tug-of-war with the food we eat, a battle in which we are measuring the spoils-calories-all wrong.įood is energy for the body. Whereas the birds want to get as many calories from fruits as possible-including from the seeds-the plants are invested in protecting their progeny. Eventually, little jungles grew.Ĭlearly, the plants that emus eat have evolved seeds that can survive digestion relatively unscathed. My colleagues and I planted thousands of collected seeds and waited. I was trying to figure out how often seeds pass all the way through the emu digestive system intact enough to germinate. At one particularly strange moment in my career, I found myself picking through giant conical piles of dung produced by emus-those goofy Australian kin to the ostrich.
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