From an Ayurvedic perspective, when food enters our mouth the distinction between the food and our body becomes increasingly blurred. The food we eat nourishes our tissues, assembles our structure, and nurtures our mind. It literally becomes us. And our ability to absorb, process and release the energy contained in food relies on the strength and efficiency of our digestion. Our digestion, in turn, relies on a balanced diet containing appropriately cooked, unprocessed food.
A breakdown in any of the pillars supporting our body results in its inevitable breakdown. With this in mind I bring attention to the topic of calories.
We accept calories, the supposed measurement of the energy contained in food, as a product of scientific study. We accept calorific values as unadulterated evidence that a particular food will make us fat, make us thin, or simply provide us with a discrete amount of energy.
However, calories – as interest rates are to the financial industry – are largely a useless analysis of the benefit of a particular food. On their own, calories are a blind acceptance on faith as to the net effect a food will have on the human body. Much like superfoods, we are devoted in our acceptance of calories as both relevant and consequential.
But this faith in calories is not entirely our own doing. Our faith exists because calories have been given tremendous stature by the food producers and advertising media, and so it has come to be that we believe what we read on the sides of food packaging.
Where calories originated provides some insight into why calories are not all that they seem.
At the end of the 19th century, Wilbur Atwater created a method for calculating the energy component of food, a method now known as the The Atwater System. And although our food has changed significantly – by becoming more processed and refined – the formula for arriving at the calorific value of food has largely remained unchanged.
Using the Atwater System, if we wanted to measure the calorie content of, for example, a carrot we would do as follows:
Place the carrot inside a container with an appropriate amount of oxygen, surround the sealed container with water, and then ignite the oxygen/carrot combination. Heat would naturally be produced by the burning and for every degree centigrate that the temperature of one gram of water rose, the carrot would be said to contain one calorie. So, for example, if the temperature of one gram of water rose ten degrees in total then the carrot would contain ten calories (actually, it would contain 10,000 calories because what we call a calorie is in fact 1,000 calories but that’s another story altogether).
Atwater also summarised the data of 97 human digestion experiments and to arrive at “average coefficients of digestability”. This indicated how much of each food was available to the body after digestion – in the case of meat this value is 97%, cereals 85%, legumes 78%, and so on.
This all seems rather simple. And it is. And so Atwater developed a table containing the basic foods and their calorie content – 9 calories per gram of fat, 4 calories for a gram of protein, etc. Fast forward a hundred years and many food producers use these same values when labeling their food.
The Atwater System, although grounded in science, raises several questions when we begin to investigate his conclusions from an Ayurvedic perspective. Do we all digest food with the same coefficient? Are all fats/proteins/carbohydrates the same? Does refined white flour provide the same energy as wholewheat flour? How far could the human body go on a gallon of gasoline?
Let me answer these questions in reverse order.
A gallon of gasoline contains roughly 31,000 calories and as such the human body could go for roughly two weeks without requiring a topup. Of course gasoline is toxic to the human body so this is entirely a fool’s errand. But this raises another important question: we can calculate the calorific value of anything, but does that make it food?
Gasoline provides no nutrition for the human body and yet it is able to provide an extraordinary amount of (empty) calories. This is no different from a can of soda pop, refined oils, refined candy, etc – these foods contain largely empty calories and as such, are toxic to the human body. If a calorie contains no nutrition it will lead to disease.
On the other end of the spectrum we now have energy drinks which claim to provide the body with what it needs but contain zero calories. These are intended to be taken after exercise as a means of quenching thirst without adding back the calories you have just worked so hard to remove. But how can food have flavour and substance without calories?
Water is an obvious zero calorie drink – it tastes as you would expect zero calories to taste. Other zero calorie drinks are, however, achieving taste through the use of chemicals. Many reports appear in the press to highlight the effects of chemicals on the human body – Bisphenol A as an example – but we often overlook food additives when speaking of chemicals. These are no different from environmental toxins and although the short term effect may be muted, the long term effect is disastrous.
Many food additives have been banned over the years as their toxicity has become apparent. For example, boric acid was banned after over 50 years of commercial use, and more recently research shows that chemical food additives can lead to hyperactivity in children.
But my point is not to focus on the toxicity of food additives, however apparent that may be, but rather to emphasise that if something sounds too good to be true then it probably is. Especially when it comes to the human body.
Zero calories, low fat, same “great” taste? I bear bad news when I tell you that eating a diet rich in these advertisements will not come to any good.
In Ayurveda the concept of calories does not exist in any form and using this ancient science as a foundation, there are a number of reasons that this modern analysis of food does not make inherent sense:
1. Not all digestions have the same strength.
Ayurveda believes that four types of digestion exist – in simple terms these are fast, slow, variable and balanced. Someone with a fast digestion will digest quickly and easily, seemingly with little effort. Slow would be the opposite and variable would be a combination of both. Balanced digestion, on the other hand, is a content ease available only to very few people.
As none of these types digest at similar rates, their supposed calorie intake would differ greatly. Someone having a fast digestion would require more calories but yet not put on the expected weight. The opposite would be true for the slow digester. Even at the same age, height, weight and gender, these two contrasting types would have to follow vastly different diets in order to maintain comparable appearance.
2. Not all digestions have the same efficiency.
This is possibly the most overlooked aspect of the human digestion. Some people have a seemingly amazing ability assimilate everything they eat. Their digestion is highly effective and they extract close to 100% of the nutrition and energy from their diet. Other digestive tracts are not as effective, due to diet and lifestyle these people are barely able to extract 60% of the nutrition and energy from their food. Through diagnosis Ayurveda can identify these people and their digestion can be improved – but the very existence of these people is ignored by modern medicine and the calorie counters.
It can be said that the calorie numbers on packaging ignore your uniqueness entirely.
3. Not all diets are created equally.
According to Ayurveda, eating the same types of food will enable your digestion to more easily identify and digest the food in your diet. This means that it will take less energy to digest easily recognisable food and therefore provide the body with more net energy. It also means that going “off piste” in your diet will reduce your digestive efficiency and require more energy for digestion.
The fallacy of calories is no doubt becoming more clear.
4. Not all food is cooked equally.
Ayurveda maintains that cooked food is easier to digest. Any heat you add to food before it enters your digestive tract results in less work for your body to perform in order to appropriately assimilate the food. Simply put, stewed carrots are far easier to digest than raw carrots. And if you add spices to enhance the effect of the digestive enzymes then it becomes even easier to assimilate. It even depends on how the food is cooked – fried food can be congestive, baked food can be a little drying, overcooked food can be too acidic, etc. If the food is not cooked appropriately for your digestive tract it can result in increased difficulty for the stomach, small intestine, large intestine combination.
Calorie counts do not care for the cooking process.
5. Not all food is processed equally.
I’ll end on this note as it is perhaps the most relevant in the modern diet.
Does it matter in any way what the calories of refined sugar may be if the net effect on your body, after years of use, is diabetes? Is there a calorie number that indicates your likelihood of Chrohn’s disease when eating refined flour?
Whole foods digest very efficiently in the body and provide a host of additional benefits to the digestive tract that refined food simply does not. Neither the Atwater System, nor calories in general, take into account the value of eating a diet based on whole, nutritious foods.
Next time you consider the number of calories of a meal, think for a moment how your digestion is functioning and if that food will degrade or improve it. The more we eat to improve the functioning of our digestion through appropriate eating, the less “calories” will matter and the healthier our bodies will be.
