If a calorie is the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C . . . . .?

Question

If a calorie is the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C, then why is it all over food products? And why are there more calories in certain foods than others? Why is more calories bad?

Answer 1

The old story goes that, if you consume a ½ liter can of cold (5°C) beer, then the human body would need to generate 13500 calories to warm the beer to body temperature (32°C). But the beer only contains 100 calories, so drinking cold beer should permit me to lose weight, right?

But anyone who has ever seen a beer gut KNOWS that there's something wrong here, and this is the trick: There are two definitions of "calorie" being used here.

The chemist's calorie is the value you describe -- one calorie raises 1 ml of water 1C°.

The dieticians "calorie" is a chemist's KILOcalorie -- that's 1000 chemist's calories. So that beer drinker didn't use energy to warm up the beer, he actually consumed 100,000 chemists calories, so he ingested 86500 excess calories, which ends up being converted into fat.

Consumption of too many more calories than you burn running your body makes you fat. That's why caloric content is on food labels.

Answer 2

Hey there...You answered your own question in the first sentence...A calorie is a unit of energy...Just to clear that all up though ....if you were to eat say 100 calories of something say peanuts....and then you burned with fire the same amount of peanuts you would find that the peanuts contained 100 calories of energy (enough to raise 100grams of water 1 deg C) ...in you or in the fire!!!!...and since you can convert calories to BTU you can find the number of watts and since watts can be converted to horsepower you now have the universal divisor of all energy at your fingertips...the CALORIE...
Ever wondered how many calories were in food and how to find out...you can always experiment or you can look in just about any diet plan that counts calories...100 for a pat of butter ,350 for a twinkie, or 110 for a real soda pop..well all those things have calories and somewhere someone has either calculated or experimented (qualitative or quantitative) to find the amount..And here is the let down part not everyone eats just the right amount of food ,Duh!!, well i was just kidding we know you and i do...anyway when you eat a surplus a pesons body stores the overburden as a hard fat called phopholipids ,,,these are maintained for temperature and moisture for a later date...When you really overdo your intake you can gain enormous amounts and these hard pounds are very hard to remove. Your body sees these as a store house for times when food is unavailable...then when people see that they have gained all these pounds the first response is "i got to go on a diet !" so they stop eating for a week ,,instead of your body responding with a huge weight loss it sees this a a famine time and instead stores more fat than ever...all this fat is measured in calories. The best way to loose weight is to eat sensibly or in moderation less calories than a maintenace amount...Well i hope you see why all those foods have calorie contents on them now and why its so important....Have a good one..From the E

Answer 3

A calorie (lower case c) is defined as you indicate. On food labels, a Calorie is a nutritional calorie, which is 1000 calories with a little c.

The amount of energy which foods can provide to a body is measured in terms of nutritional calories. In general, a human needs to consume between 1500 and 2000 Calories each day to provide the energy to maintain a body and to function. The more physically active you are, the greater your energy needs are.

Each kind of food provides a different amount of calories because food are made up of different things and come from different sources. The amount of calories in a food depends on the serving size as well as its content of sugars and other carbohydrates, protein and fat.

Regardless of the foods you consume, if you take in more calories than you expend in a day, and particularly over longer periods of time, the excess nutrients will be converted into fat and stored in your body. This leads to weight gain, obesity, increased risk of heart disease and stroke, diabetes and other health problems.

Answer 4

Because we use the calorie to determine how much energy is created in a chemical reaction. When you body exercises it throws ATP at the muscle giving it the chemical power to contract upon command. The reaction of burning the fuel produces so many calories of heat.

You need to burn calories to remove fat, because that is what causes those fat cells to release and dump there contents into the blood stream to get that extra energy.

It is hard to relate calories to fat or to weight, but it is fairly easy to relate calories to exercise. A simple computer can learn you weight and then monitor the exercise machine to see how much exercise you are doing and how many calories you are burning off.

To determine how many calories are in a food scientists burn the food and measure the heat produced, along with the by products weight. This is then used to determine how much heat was created by the actual burning food, not by the fire. This is an empirical measurement; one that can easily be done and repeated, so it has become a standard.

Answer 5

The calorie listed on food products is actually the kcalorie or (large) Calorie.

It is a measure of energy. If you were to combust sucrose in a bomb calorimeter you would measure a heat of combustion of about 3.95 kilocalories per gram.

The Calories listed on food are a measure of the energy the body can obtain by ingesting the food. The bomb calorimetry data from foods (correct for metabolism products and excreta) are derived from the Atwater system, which uses 4 kcalories per gram of protein and carbohydrate, and 9 kcalories per gram of fat.

So a food that contains 4g protein, 15.0g carbohydrate. and 2.5g of fat (per serving) has a caloric content of 4x4 + 15x4 + 2.5x9 = 98.5 Calories (98,500 calories).

Food labels and calorie books do not always use the capital "C" to designate large calories or kilocalories. (They just assume that everyone knows that food calories are kilocalories).

Answer 6

The calorie is a measure of energy. When you eat food, you eat to get energy, like you put gas in your car to put energy in it. To get energy out of the food you burn the food. Some food like sugar gives you a lot of energy when you burn it while some other foods like cucumber give very little energy.

Eating food that give a lot of energy is good if you need this energy; the problem is that in western world you often eat food that gives you more energy than you need. Since your body is careful (it makes reserves for time where food will become scarce) it will accumulate this excessive energy as fat. But when fat reserve becomes excessive, this can cause health problems

Answer 7

More calories doesn't mean it is bad. It depends on where the calories are from.

raise 1 g by 1 °C = 1 cal, you need energy, don't you? some food have more energy because their chemical bonds store more potential energy or require less energy to break. it is called enthalpy.

Answer 8

Questions 2 and 3 involve phase change. It will require much more than 1 cal to change the phase of a gram of water.

Answer 9

A calorie is a measurement of potential when it comes to food items. Not only that, food calories are 1000 calories each (if it says one portion = 250 calories, it's 250,000 defined calories - the amount of energy it would take to warm 2.5 liters of water from zero degrees to boiling.)

As potential energy, it means you have to expend that level of energy to rid yourself of those calories that your body parks as fat.