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For decades people who want to control their weight have been told to count calories. Given that the great majority of diets fail, is this good advice? Could the calorie be one of the biggest delusions in dietary history? The idea of counting calories was introduced by Wilbur Atwater. He believed that a calorie is a calorie. His theory was that a calorie provided the body with an equal amount of energy no matter what kind of food or micronutrient it came from. He concluded that one gram of either protein or carbohydrate provided four calories of energy, compared with nine from one gram of fat. And more than a century later, that series of numbers four, four, nine, remains in standard use around the world today to calculate the energy that we get from foods.
But what Atwater didn't factor in at the time was that different people burn different foods at different rates depending on their genetic makeup, or variables such as the type of bacteria in an individual's gut. And cooking food will increase the amount of calories a person can absorb from it. Atwater's findings led to the misconception that fat always leads to more weight gain than other foods, including sugar. This theory has shaped dietary policy in the West for decades. In fact, if excess sugar is in the bloodstream, then insulin stacks it straight into fatty tissue, making eating sugar the fastest way to create body fat. The fault is not entirely Atwater's. In 1967 the sugar industry secretly funded Harvard University research designed to point the blame for rising obesity levels at fat rather than sugar. This led the U.S. Senate and many other governments to recommend a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet. That advice coincided with the most dramatic rise in obesity in human history, contributing to a rapid rise in cardiovascular diseases, which have become the leading cause of death worldwide. Atwater's assumptions have become so deeply entrenched in society that many deem an overhaul of the system too disruptive and expensive. But more than a century on, it's time to bury the world's most useless measure.
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