Philip Pape: 0:02

Calories don't exist, they're just made up numbers. You don't eat calories, you eat food. I've been hearing this argument more and more lately on social media, usually from people trying to dismiss energy balance or convince you that calorie counting is pointless and, by that same logic, miles don't exist when you're driving, watts don't exist when you're lifting and money doesn't exist when you're buying groceries. Today we're exploring why this argument reveals a misunderstanding of how measurement works in science and engineering. You'll discover why calories are actually one of the most precise tools we have for understanding energy and how this measurement has revolutionized everything from food production to space travel. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency. I'm your host, certified nutrition coach, philip Pape, and today we're tackling one of the most misunderstood concepts in nutrition and fitness. I'm not even sure why I have to address this, but I've noticed a trend on social media or in YouTube comments where people dismiss calories as not real or just abstract numbers, and it usually comes up when someone wants to argue against energy balance or suggest that tracking food is somehow meaningless. But as someone with an engineering background who loves data, who sees the power of how it helps people. This drives me absolutely nuts. It's like saying temperature isn't real because you can't hold a degree Fahrenheit in your hand, or horsepower doesn't exist because you can't see it under your car's hood. I mean, this is basic math, it's basic abstraction, but it's, I think, more fundamental than that and that's why I'm creating a whole episode about it. So today we're going to use this thinking, this database thinking, to break down exactly what calories are, why they're incredibly useful and why the calories aren't real argument misunderstands how measurement and science work and really the end goal here is so that you're better informed in explaining this and understand why I propose some of the methods I do that are extremely beneficial to people who are trying to do things like lose fat and build muscle Before we get into it. If you want to understand the fundamentals of nutrition without getting lost in the weeds, and simply want the steps for you to set up your nutrition plan, you can download my free Nutrition 101 guide. It just gives you the steps like energy balance, macronutrients and yes, calories and how to set them up in a way that makes sense. So grab your copy of the link in the show notes or go to wentsohatescom slash free.

Philip Pape: 2:48

All right, let's get into why calories are very real, very useful and why dismissing them is kind of insane. Okay, I'm gonna start by fairly representing this argument, because I've heard it from multiple sources now. Every time it comes up, I'm like well, what is going on? But I want to make sure I'm not straw manning anyone. And the basic argument goes something like this Calories are just a unit of measurement.

Philip Pape: 3:13

They're not a physical thing that you can touch or see. You don't eat calories, you eat food. Therefore, focusing on calories is missing the point, because food quality, hormones and metabolism are what really matter. Some variation of that right, pieces of that, all of it maybe it's a little different. Some variations I've heard include calories are just a made-up construct, or your body doesn't count calories in response to food, or calorie counting is reductionist thinking that ignores the complexity of human biology, and you get all different levels of, let's say, iq. In the way these statements are delivered, and some of them are very convincing sounding. Now there's a kernel of truth buried in there. There is yes, calories are a unit of measurement. Yes, you do eat food, you don't eat numbers. And yes, food quality matters beyond just caloric content. So let's get into why this just falls apart.

Philip Pape: 4:06

In engineering, we have a concept called measurement. Validity engineering and science right. Just because something is a measurement doesn't make it less real or less useful. In fact, measurements are often the only way we can understand and control complex systems, and I want to give you some examples that are really good parallels to the calorie argument.

Philip Pape: 4:27

Let's talk about miles. Miles are kilometers. Miles aren't real. Right? A mile is an arbitrary unit that we, as humans, created to measure distance. You can't hold a mile in your hand. Your car doesn't drive miles. It moves through space, yet somehow GPS works and companies like Amazon can deliver your package and we can navigate the world using this made up measurements Money. Money isn't real. It's one of the most unreal things on the planet. It is just numbers on a screen or pieces of paper with agreed upon what's called fiat value, based on a government saying that this is what it's worth. You don't eat money when you buy groceries. You exchange it for food, yet somehow the entire global economy functions on this abstract measurement system. And then, of course, we have horsepower, which is a calculated measurement based on work over time. Your engine in your car doesn't produce little horses, yet somehow engineers use horsepower to design everything from motorcycles to rockets. So you see the pattern here.

Philip Pape: 5:23

That the calories aren't real argument could be applied to literally any measurement in science or engineering. It's like saying temperature doesn't matter because you can't hold the degree I mentioned that earlier. Or blood pressure is meaningless because you can't see millimeters of mercury, and this is what we call a category error in logic. Just because something is a measurement doesn't make it less valid, less useful or less real in terms of its practical applications. And, by the way, if this all sounds obvious, I think it's important sometimes to step back and think of the fundamental philosophy by which humans categorize and describe things, or even what's called epistemology. It's like the science of knowing. Sometimes we even have to question why we created these things in the first place and how they are applicable. And as a guy who loves math, it comes a little bit more natural to me At least, the fascination with it is more natural, but I totally understand why it can be confusing in certain contexts. So let's talk about what calories actually measure and then why they're incredibly precise and useful.

Philip Pape: 6:24

For our context on wits and weights, a calorie is simply a unit of energy. Specifically, it's the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. So when we talk about food calories, we're actually talking about kilocalories, a thousand calories or lowercase c calories. So sometimes food labels will say K, c A L, that's the equivalent of capital C A L calories. That's, that's part of the confusion, right? So a kilocalorie is what we call a calorie on food labels. It's a thousand of those units of energy, and this measurement is so precise that we can use it to calculate everything from how much fuel a rocket needs to reach orbit to how much food a submarine crew needs for a six month deployment. We actually use calories to determine that, and the energy content in a food is measured using bomb collimetry, right? And that's a uh method where you literally burn food samples in a controlled environment I think it's in a vacuum and then you measure the heat that gets released, right? So it isn't an arbitrary number someone made up. It is a direct measurement of the chemical energy stored in the molecular bonds of the food.

Philip Pape: 7:42

Now you might say, okay, fine, philip, our bodies aren't calorimeters. We don't burn food the same way. And you're right, this is where what's called useful approximation comes in. All right, in engineering we use approximations all the time. We know they're not perfect, but they're accurate enough to be incredibly useful, and if we didn't have them we would just not be able to make anything right.

Philip Pape: 8:05

The calorie content of food, combined with how we understand human metabolism, gives us an approximation that is accurate enough to do lots of amazing things to predict weight changes with remarkable precision, to design nutrition programs, to calculate food requirements for military operations, to develop guidelines for public health Now I know that one maybe has an asterisk on it, given some people's skepticism for government and to help individuals achieve their physique goals. Now, I say it that way in that kind of list, because these are all actual things that we do relying on calories. So is it perfect? No, is it useful Absolutely? And again, that's just by knowing how many kilocalories are in food. Just having that metric, that data right, which we only have thanks to a lot of great people that have looked at foods, required foods on labels, studying them, put them into databases for us, that's how we can do that. That's how we know how many calories are in a medium-sized apple. And then here's where this gets really interesting, if it's not already to you and I didn't lose you I want to take you down a rabbit hole that most people don't think about.

Philip Pape: 9:11

The development of collimetry didn't just help us understand food. It was part of the development of thermodynamics, which literally powers everything today. The same principles we use to measure calories in food are what allowed engineers to develop steam engines, internal combustion engines, power plants and, yes, rockets and I don't know. I have a fascination with rockets in outer space, forgive me. So when we measure the calorie content of our food, we are tapping into the physics of thermodynamics. So that's another argument people make is like well, thermodynamics doesn't apply here. I'm not sure how anyone can back up that claim. I mean, this is the reason stars shine and the universe exists. So this is the beauty of measurement in science, because when you find a good measurement tool, it gives you an abstract ability to find connections and patterns that you didn't expect, and it usually leads to an explosion in science and technology. And I know you're like what does this have to do with a health fitness podcast? I'm not connected. All for you in a very important way shortly, so please keep listening.

Philip Pape: 10:13

Speaking of your body, your body is extremely efficient. A car engine is about 25% efficient at converting fuel energy in a mechanical work Of course, much more efficient now that we have electric cars, but that's not the point. Your body, when you're walking, can achieve about the same efficiency about 25% and that is actually pretty remarkable, given that it's a biological system and the calorie measurement is what allowed scientists to figure this out. Without the unit of energy, we couldn't compare our biological systems to mechanical systems, for example, which then allowed us to determine what kind of energy was coming in and out, and that allows us to determine metabolism. That allows us to determine metabolism. So it kind of boggles the mind that people would somehow dismiss something so embedded in our understanding of energy.

Philip Pape: 10:59

And why then are people still so eager to dismiss this, to dismiss calories as not real or not useful? And I think, in my experience at least, it comes down from one of three places. I narrowed it down to three. If you have another idea, let me know. The first one is the complexity argument, that human biology is too complex for simple calorie counting to tell you anything useful, right? Or our metabolism is so complex, our body is so complex. Now, I've called our bodies complex, but I've also not used that as a scapegoat for being able to measure things that our body does. It's two separate arguments. Yes, human biology is complex, so what it's like saying we shouldn't use math to build bridges because structural engineering is complex. Complexity doesn't invalidate the measurement, it just makes measurement even more important, especially when it's approximating the system. So that's the first one.

Philip Pape: 11:52

The second one is the personal experience argument that calorie counting didn't work for me or doesn't work for lots of people. Or look at all the people on the GLP-1s. Obviously calories didn't help them. And no, it's like saying speedometers don't work because you got a speeding ticket right. The measurement tool isn't. The problem is the way I'm going to put that. You know I'm not trying to gaslight anyone, but I can go down a litany of issues that are usually related to lifestyle behavior before we get to something like calories. And even when we get to calories, it's not the calories themselves, it's everything you're doing that affects how your body uses calories and your metabolism that results in, for example, not being able to be in a calorie deficit like you would have liked or would have thought right. So it's that personal experience, kind of straw man.

Philip Pape: 12:34

The third reason I think and this is the one that concerns me, I guess is the anti-reductionism argument. This is from a philosophical position that says that breaking complex systems down into measurable components is somehow wrong or limiting. But reductionism is how we understand and control complex systems right. When engineers design airplanes and I know a little bit about that, being in the aerospace world they reduce the complex problem of flight into measurable components like lift, drag, thrust, weight. Think about how we make computers. They are so complex. But we have to use reductionism and break things down into components. Even just have a craftsman building a really beautiful, sturdy piece of furniture has to use reductionism to break down that problem into its separate parts, to make it possible at all, as a human, to not let our minds explode.

Philip Pape: 13:32

And the same is true of nutrition and body composition. Yes, hormones matter. Yes, food quality matters. Yes, individual metabolism varies, but calories provide us with a foundational measurement that allows us to account for and work with all of these variables, almost like an entire what's called black box in the business, where you don't even have to understand or know what's going on inside, but you can measure the food coming in using calories and then the energy going out based on your body weight and voila, you actually know how many calories you're burning. It's incredible. So it's not either, or it's both, and that's really my point. So how do we apply this to nutrition in a way that acknowledges both the usefulness of calories and the complexity of human biology? And I kind of touched on it a couple times.

Philip Pape: 14:18

But the first thing to really glom onto here is calories are a tool. That's it. They're just a tool. They're not a religion. It's not like we believe in them. Like any tool, they're useful when you apply them correctly and they're misleading when they're misused, period. The second thing is we understand that precision doesn't require perfection. This is a really important concept. We don't need to count every single calorie to benefit from understanding energy balance. You can approximate, you can estimate, you can have very rough orders of magnitude, and the fact that you're tracking at all and within what we found to be is around 30% plus or minus, is a superior for meeting your goals and having control over your food and weight change than not tracking. That is extremely imprecise or, I'm sorry, imperfect, but it gives you enough precision. Precision meaning like you're within the range of where you need, such that that measurement helps you.

Philip Pape: 15:18

And then the third I guess practice here is that we use calories as part of a larger system of measurements. It's not the only thing we rely on. When I learned to fly a plane years ago, I got my pilot's license. We had six instruments that we relied on, and if anyone broke, we had five left to rely on right. There's redundancy. So just like we don't rely on one measurement there, we shouldn't rely on solely calories to understand nutrition, but we also shouldn't dismiss them.

Philip Pape: 15:48

So in practical terms, this means understanding that calories do provide extremely valuable information about energy balance, and we also consider factors like food quality, nutrient timing, your individual response, your lifestyle factors, your stress, your training, and the list goes on right. And we don't have to even make that list too complicated. Each one of them has its own highly useful approximation use. I just use useful twice. You know what I mean. So this is the approach I take with clients we use calories as a baseline measurement tool, but then we adjust based on real world results, based on your response, based on other markers, and it can give us information that hey, something else, a different thing we're measuring may need focus right now.

Philip Pape: 16:30

So I think when someone says calories aren't real or they're just an abstract, I think they're usually expressing a deeper frustration with the reductionist thinking that we have today, in this world that feels increasingly overwhelming, overly complex. They want simple answers, but then they're rejecting the tools that could actually provide clarity. Or maybe conversely, they're looking for something more complicated and thinking calories are too simplistic. I don't know. And I think what's beautiful about measurement of this type is it doesn't just simplify the complex systems by ignoring their complexity. It provides a common language, a common narrative that we can speak to each other in, and it doesn't even have to be the same like human language. Right, it's math which, effectively, is a universal language where we can understand and work with that complexity again, without our minds exploding. So every time you use calories as a tool to measure your food, you're participating in the same scientific tradition that goes all the way back to discovering antibiotics, developing space travel, creating the internet, using the same principles that allow engineers to build skyscrapers and doctors to save lives. Right, the measurement isn't the enemy of complexity, it is what makes complexity manageable.

Philip Pape: 17:48

All right, but I do want to give one final caveat to this episode, and that is to acknowledge that because, or acknowledging that calories are real and that they're useful doesn't mean you have to obsessively count every single one, all right, I mentioned this once already. But it doesn't mean you have to ignore food quality. It doesn't mean you ignore hormones or individual differences. It means you have access to a very powerful tool for understanding energy metabolism. That's all it means. Whether you choose to use it is up to you. But given how easy it is to use it today with databases, with apps, with apps like Macrofactor that I love to use because it takes that information, that exact information of calories in and weight out, you know weight change and says here is your metabolism, and it actually does that pretty darn accurately. I mean, we make decisions every day based on that that are helping people get the body and the physique and the health that they want.

Philip Pape: 18:39

Calories are real, they're measurable, they're useful and if you understand them just a little bit, it's going to make you better equipped to achieve whatever goals you're working toward. To make you better equipped to achieve whatever goals you're working toward, all right. If you want to learn how to use calories and other measurements as tools rather than just rules, grab my free nutrition one-on-one guide. I'll show you how to think about nutrition a little more objectively, like an engineer, systematically, evidence-based, setting up the numbers for yourself, and then you can use that to see where else the focus might need to be. You can get the link in the show notes or go to witsandweightscom slash free. All right, until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights. And remember just because something is a measurement doesn't make it less real. In fact, good measurements are what make reality manageable. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights Podcast.